April 2018 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: [tor-talk] Google reCAPTCHA
by grarpamp 27 Apr '18

27 Apr '18

Even forgetting website admins and the whole third party recaptcha cloudflare debacle, where so many users are just closing their tabs on those sites and going elsewhere, for the moment, The fact that Google itself does this censoring, enslavement, tracking and data mining / brokering in front its own search service [1] that service marketed as benefit the whole worlds users... except obviously in particular to tor users which they know are using tor exits, and even already have a solved cookie for, but still block their browser's search again and again after that... is totally absurd and hypocritical lie. And the typical wishy washy silent corporate stance on such things. Who is not to analysis and then declare that situation similar to... "fuck google... they've been evil since day one." [1] https://www.google.com/ Anyone wanting to start new services based on new honorable models, including privacy, micropay, donations, etc... thanks to this "free" abuse for decades by all the big services, there is much oppurtunity out there to startup better ideas in that vacuum.

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India Crypto Currency Ban: Facts and Viewpoints
by grarpamp 27 Apr '18

27 Apr '18

On Sun, Apr 8, 2018 at 10:59 AM, John Levine <johnl(a)iecc.com> wrote: >>No such jurisdiction beyond themselves. > > The RBI regulates all the banks in India Only their banks, not biz or people. Maybe their govt too, lol. > this will shut down any > cryptocurrency exchanges in India Both exchanges and citizens can still open foreign account. And local exchanges can still reasonably operate using cash or all that Indian gold, or cows, contracts, etc. > the banks, who do not want to > annoy their regulator The banks, who are in business to make money, should throw out their regulators so they can try to do that, subject to the free market. Then again, one of cryptocurrency's messages... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWAwK2fHArc > if Indians want to buy or sell cryptocurrencies, they're back to the > pre-Mt.Gox situation of trying to find someone local who'll trade them > for cash. Indian markets are diverse and interconnected as any other, this is not a problem. And cryptocurrency is used in both directions. > Keep in mind that there are only about 10 million Bitcoin wallets in > the world There are 55 Million UTXO's, down from the 67M that were uneconomical to consolidate no thanks to BTC's issues. That's just for BTC, not all the other coins and tokens. Wallet estimates are harder to pinpoint. Feel free to link to some good papers on that. > and I doubt as many as a million of them are in India. > There are over a billion people in India so we're talking about under > 0.1% of the Indian population... a poor country, where rural phone ladies > rent mobile phones Even if that, not a bad adoption rate so far, and the guerrilla networking, love the ingenuity from necessity, ftw. > 15c for a few minutes of data. Transactions are relayed in under that time. Probably quite the deal for larger / distant transactions compared to other forms, including shipping gold and Rupees around. > Even if cryptocurrencies were a good idea, which they aren't Unsubstantiated FUD. Sad to see on one of the lists where cryptocurrencies were born. At least cryptography is still agnostic, at least until cryptographers start taking the knee and advertising the fake backdoored crypto they can concoct as "strong crypto" to serve their masters. > India doesn't have the infrastructure to use them other than > by rich people in cities. FUD. Cities have the infrastructure, anyone in a city is at least enough to be alive there, internet cafes and p2p relations work fine and more efficiently there as well, for rich and poor. > Since the badly handled withdrawal of high value banknotes in November > 2016 (I was there, same week as the US election) Indian banks have > pushed hard to provide conventional electronic payments with credit > and debit cards. I was impresssed how many of the stalls at markets > had handheld card terminals. Paying the mandatory extra card tax and high interest to middlemen pockets regardless of network operation costs for nothing in return that cryptocurrency can't provide for less, and freely. Unless you count the chargeback and tx censorship babysitting that keeps people and systems down from independance, and the "free money" advertising that keeps from choosing ownership. Yes they have to 'push hard' because the people smartly resist back against it.... >>RBI stock price drops on news as competitors move in. > > The RBI is run by the Indian government, does not issue stock, and > since it is the central bank, has no competitors. ...ahh yes, yet another monopoly artificially propped up upon force of death at gunpoint, how delightful. They offer you no choice. Cryptocurrency does. > Were we saying something about fake news? "Stock in faith" has a price too, the worldwide adoption of cryptocurrency to date says fiat [itself / systems / entities] been dropping quite a bit, both in faith and into cryptocurrency forex. Nothing fake there.

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Re: [Cryptography] Review of UBIC
by grarpamp 27 Apr '18

27 Apr '18

On Fri, Apr 27, 2018 at 9:47 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill(a)hallambaker.com> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 12:03 PM, Ubicorn via cryptography > <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> wrote: >> >> I posted some weeks ago regarding my Universal Basic Income Cryptocurrency >> project and I just finished a Whitepaper draft that can be seen here: >> https://github.com/UBIC-repo/Whitepaper >> If someone has a suggestions he or she is free to open a pull request or >> send me an email. > > > UBI is something that anyone serious about tech needs to be thinking about > because our current capitalist economy is based on the assumption that labor > is a scarce resource and is structured to allocate it efficiently (by some > measure). > > As Karl Marx pointed out, the system will fall when automation reaches the > Malthus... Puritans... Theresa May... > ... > [snip 500 word essay] Hey thanks for getting your posts about "the technical, social, political, security, privacy, legal, multinational aspects of cryptosystems" posted to this list. That means such discussions relating to same are infact fully approved, and yet another resubmittal per that is warranted, again witnesseth cypherpunks. On Sun, Apr 15, 2018 at 7:33 PM, <cryptography-owner(a)metzdowd.com> wrote: > "This thread is dead as it was an admitted fake news article." The OP posted snippets of junk journalism. Another poster corrected it with links to source docs and much better journalism. Then another poster posted yet more flaky content. For which a proper counter / alternative is warranted. There's lots of other material relavant to "technical, social, political, security, privacy, legal, multinational aspects of cryptosystems' in that to be completed thread for which the list could ponder lively, and should given cryptocurrency is the newest mass critical cryptosystem out there. Also, "Will We Ever Learn", "The Bob Morris Worm", "Unicode", "Speculation" and many other threads over time questionably met charter as barely mentioning any applied / underlying cryptographic / topical element in them. It's being reposted, witnesseth cypherpunks. Do what you want with it.

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Makers: Open Simple LIDAR
by grarpamp 27 Apr '18

27 Apr '18

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16756901 https://github.com/iliasam/OpenSimpleLidar Replacing Facebook https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16758481 AMA Mike Hearn https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/89z483/ama_ask_mike_anything/

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Audiobook: The Most Dangerous Superstition
by grarpamp 26 Apr '18

26 Apr '18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg0zIvxwVaM http://mp3.anarchistphilosophies.com/mostdangeroussuperstition.mp3

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YOU Are Being Social Scored and Controlled
by grarpamp 26 Apr '18

26 Apr '18

https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/04/26/0241243/chinese-journalist-banned-… http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2018/04/24/china-assigns-every-citizen-a-social…

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“security is no excuse for poor performance”, says seL4 FTW
by Zenaan Harkness 26 Apr '18

26 Apr '18

For those unwilling to compromise, the stack begins … http://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/seL4/ Easy introductions: seL4 is free: What does this mean for you? (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRndE7rSXiI From L3 to seL4: What have we learned in 20 years of L4 microkernels? (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdoaFc5-1Rk (from here: https://docs.sel4.systems/GettingStarted.html ) https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/sel4-raspberry-pi-3/ The seL4 kernel is a burgeoning project that’s been creating a buzz in the security world for its uncompromising capability-based security model that comes with end-to-end proofs of conformance to its formal specification. It’s a microkernel, and it’s the fastest of its ilk. It says, “Security is no excuse for poor performance!”, and then backs it up. It’s open source. It’s free. It’s an increasingly relevant disruption in the Operating Systems monolith. https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/introducing-device-untyped-memory-sel4/ These invariants allow us to prove that any kernel memory access is not to a device register, no matter what the initialisation component does, and no matter whether it is trusted or not. This means, verification helped us to not only improve one specific case, but also makes sure this entire kind of problem will not re-occur, and to reduce the trust that is necessary in the rest of the system. More¦ https://research.csiro.au/tsblog/ Plenty to learn, plenty to improve (from the raspberry pi 3 link above): There is no silver-tongued way to say, that seL4 has a fairly involved build-dependency set-up procedure. We know it’s tedious, and we’re working on it. Here’s the simple description: you’ll need a compiler toolchain that can target your platform, and the “Repo” script, which is really just a script released by Google, that is a git submodule-management replacement. We use some Python scripts to generate some headers and our custom bitfield functions, so you’ll need some python modules. Slap on an XML parser which we use to generate our syscall invocation stubs, and ncurses for our “make menuconfig”, and you’re good to go. O—M—G, sounds too difficult for folks round ’ere ... ;D Hero level bonus for the significance junkie who just can't get enough and is not in need of a trigger warning, cry-in, or sky-scream: Plug in SNABB as an isolated ubermaxx performance user space network snack and build that GPL chaff-filled I2P module the world awaits with baited breath… Dang, you know you love it :)

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Marxist apopalypse begins
by Zenaan Harkness 26 Apr '18

26 Apr '18

Cultural-/ neo- marxism, the fundament of our "modern" and largely Godless society, as Jordan Peterson points out so poignantly. Tom Luongo is a little "daily tabloid" in his somewhat adjective laden summary of the historical moment we are collectively witnessing, yet it's accurate - the game is steadily shifting, a steam roller of woke thankfully overarching the left/right identity schism which was seemingly unstoppable in its bifurcationing rift tearing society apart. Kanye West And The Utopia Trap https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-25/kanye-west-and-utopia-trap The Culture War is over. The Marxists lost. They were always going to lose. Because cultural Marxism cannot sustain itself without feeding off of other people’s wealth. It’s a parasitic ideology that first consumes the host then drives it mad to destroy everyone else. After the 2016 election of Donald Trump when Kanye West had his famous meltdown on stage and walked off during a show it was a pivotal moment. Many saw an enfant terrible throwing a tantrum and crying for attention But I didn’t. I heard a man whose world-view was in flux and causing him real pain. The kind of pain that changes a man. It’s a moment when you look at what you’ve built and see it for what it is. In Kanye’s case it wasn’t his art that was the problem, it was the reaction to it. The system supporting it. He saw the politics and structure of the music industry, rightly, as just another mechanism of social control. He railed against radio, MTV and the rest of the distribution system. He saw his place within it, how it was driving artists and fans apart, to bicker and argue while the real power lay with those controlling and stoking the conflicts. And he torched it. Willingly. With an almost hyper self-awareness. Fast forward to this week when Kanye emerges from his personal 40 days in the desert and tweets out, as Scott Adams said, “Seven Words that Changed Everything.” I love the way Candace Owens thinks — KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 21, 2018 Scott’s right about that. I’m not sure about his whole “Golden Age” thing (watch the video linked above). But, I am sure that Kanye West put paid his promise to his fans that he pissed off in November 2016 that he would be a change agent. That he wasn’t going to go along to get along, stay quiet, be a good boy and reap the benefits of a system he saw as corrupt and corrupting. Like Kanye or hate him, in this moment you have to respect him. What he did this week goes far beyond red-pilling a large swath of the American black community about how the Democrats take them for granted, use them for their purposes. What he did was throw the entirety of cultural Marxism into the ashbin of history. He just took a massive dump on the entire canon of identity politics. And then he lit it on fire and threw it on the Gatekeepers of Culture’s front door. Actions Over Intentions I don’t know how much of Kanye’s original rant was calculated performance art but I don’t care. As an economist I’ve trained myself to dispense with such nonsense. Because you don’t measure a man by his intentions. You measure him by his actions. This is one of the fundamental issues of identity politics and Marxism. The insistence that intentions are more important than consequences. Cultural Marxists wrap themselves in the moral high ground, stating their intentions are noble and selfless. The are putting the community over themselves, while denigrating those honest enough to admit they act for themselves first and the community second. And this is their defense mechanism for deflecting criticism when their plans fail. At least our intentions were pure. But, as Ayn Rand rightly pointed out, altruism doesn’t exist. One helps another person because it satisfies their own needs first and the object of their help second. Some people get immense satisfaction in helping others. And there is nothing immoral about that. It doesn’t taint their good works with the stain of profit. It simply is. So, I don’t care if Kanye did these things for purely selfish reasons or not. I don’t think he did. But, he could be the kind of malignant narcissist his critics accuse him of being, most of whom today side with the cultural Marxists. I just know that whatever his reasons he destroyed the narrative of minority victimization. And he did it with the precision of a brain surgeon, cutting out the ideological rot in millions of brains with seven words. As a writer, I’m a bit jealous. As a human being I’m eternally grateful. It’s Not My Fault! And this is why the Culture War is over. It’ll take some time, but this period of history is the culmination of more than a hundred years of Marxism as the dominant political ideology. Their long march through the institutions is complete just in time to see all of these institutions fail. They aren’t failing all at once. A pension system here, a small country’s hyperinflation there. But they are failing. Why? Because central planning in all its forms is beset with what Hayek called, “The Knowledge Problem.” In short it is that the most important knowledge, that of time and place most relevant to individual actions, is unknowable to the central planner. And that propagates errors in policy which ultimately is capital destructive. It is why global debt is out of control. It is why the central planners made the Faustian bargain with the banking cartel to create debt-based money to fund their Utopia. The Marxists get wealth redistribution but at the cost of the banks’ vig. And everyone else suffers. As we approach the moment where we finally reach the end of the societal road paved with debt these institutions will fail more rapidly. Cultural Marxism is, like all collectivist ideologies, Utopian. By divorcing intentions from consequences it not only insulates itself from criticism but sells itself as a path to higher plane of spirituality which it can’t deliver. It justifies ends with means that are abhorrent and, like all psychopaths, blames its victims. It’s never their fault when people are starving in the streets, throwing acid on infidels and selling aborted fetuses to the highest bidder. No. Basic welfare is a right. Open borders? a right. Abortion, a right. The Utopia Trap And that’s the Utopia Trap, the idea that we can make Heaven on Earth by appropriating the life and time of another person through enforced communal responsibility. On the other hand is the staunch individualist who understands that life is suffering, time is precious and death inevitable. So, no matter what bad decisions we as individuals make they are still better than the ones the willfully ignorant and ideologically blinded make for us. So, as the Culture War grinds to its inevitable conclusion, we humans will emerge from this foray into mass insanity known as Marxism smarter just like we did when we overthrew the High Priests of the Sun Gods and the Divine Rights of Kings. And if we have people like Kanye West and, yes, Donald Trump, to be our Loki figures, gleefully blowing holes in their Utopian dreams so be it. Because, honestly, who is better suited for that job?

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Cryptocurrency: Zcash 2nd Ceremony, Snarks, Starks, Dex's, Funding
by grarpamp 26 Apr '18

26 Apr '18

https://themerkle.com/mit-review-acclaims-zk-snarks-but-zk-starks-may-steal… https://themerkle.com/the-top-5-decentralized-crypto-exchanges-to-watch-out… https://z.cash.foundation//blog/conclusion-of-powers-of-tau/ https://cryptoslate.com/zcash-powers-of-tau-privacy-ceremony/ https://www.coindesk.com/zcash-team-completes-powers-of-tau-ceremony-for-up… https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2017-December/040585.html https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/8dvswx/zcash_foundation_has_250000…

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Hack-a-day: Reduce Your Travel Costs With Free Hotel Lodging
by grarpamp 26 Apr '18

26 Apr '18

https://it.slashdot.org/story/18/04/25/1451253/hackers-built-a-master-key-f… https://www.zdnet.com/article/millions-of-hotel-door-locks-bypass-with-mast…

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