May 2018 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Tor Project Picks New Executive Director, Old One Joins Board
by grarpamp 17 May '18

17 May '18

https://blog.torproject.org/announcing-tors-next-executive-director-isabela… April 23, 2018 Shari announced her retirement from the Tor Project at the end of February, and the search for our next Executive Director is already over. We're thrilled to announce our next ED, Isabela Bagueros. Isa joined the Tor Project as Project Manager in 2015 and has led teams in collaborative strategy building and roadmapping unprecedented at the organization. She also leads Tor’s UX team in implementing critical usability improvements and is leading an overhaul of Tor’s website. “Isa’s contributions to Tor are too many to name here,” said Shari Steele, Tor’s current Executive Director who was brought on in 2015 to make the organization more operationally sound. “She brings global experience and perspective to privacy and censorship issues, and I could not be more confident in her ability to lead the organization into its next phase of growth and sustainability.” Thinking of the user first has always been a priority for Isa, and during her three years with the organization, the scope of her vision for Tor has expanded to include the health of the organization and network. “I think any person on the planet should have access to the Tor network and enjoy the privacy and security it provides,” said Isa. “That means we need a healthy and scalable network and a strong and diverse organization to support that. I’m looking forward to seeing Tor gain global recognition for the privacy protections and censorship circumvention it provides.” Now in a transition phase, Isabela will officially begin her position as Executive Director after she hires her replacement Project Manager and gets up to speed on the requirements of the job. Shari will continue as Executive Director until Isabela transitions and then plans to move into a consulting role through the end of the year. Shari will join the Tor Project Board of Directors beginning January 2019. ________________________________ About Isabela Bagueros Isabela Bagueros joined the Tor Project as Project Manager in 2015, after working as Product Manager for International and Growth at Twitter for four years. Isabela has been part of the free software community since the late 90s, and in 2007 she co-founded and worked as Latin America Project Manager for North by South, a startup from San Francisco focused on free software projects. Isabela was also part of Brazil’s Federal Government Free Software initiative, working in 2005 on the Ministry of Communications digital inclusion project and participating in 2006 on a project to migrate the IT of the Presidential Palace of Brazil to free software. Isa will give the keynote address at CryptoRave, May 4th in São Paulo, Brazil. About Shari Steele Shari Steele has been the Executive Director of the Tor Project since December 2015, coming to Tor after serving as Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for 15 years. Prior to the ED role, Shari was EFF’s legal director from 1992 to 2000, where she spoke widely about civil liberties law in newly emerging technologies. A graduate of Widener University School of Law, Shari later served as a teaching fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, where she earned an LL.M. degree in Advocacy. Shari has been on EFF’s Board of Directors since 2000 and will join the Tor Project Board of Directors in January 2019. About the Tor Project The Tor Project, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) organization headquartered in Seattle with paid staff and contractors of around 35 engineers and operational support people, plus many volunteers all over the world. Tor develops free and open source software for privacy and freedom online, protecting people from tracking, surveillance, and censorship. The Tor Project’s mission is to advance human rights and freedoms by creating and deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies, support their unrestricted availability and use, and further their scientific and popular understanding.

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Eyeballing North Korea, Spanking Trump
by grarpamp 16 May '18

16 May '18

http://www.nkleadershipwatch.org/ https://www.38north.org/ https://www.uskoreainstitute.org/ https://twitter.com/JChengWSJ/status/996586112222052353 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8jrirc/nkorea_official_says_cou… https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-president-donald-trump-tu… https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/8jv1dy/eu_president_tears_into_…

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Cryptocurrency: Mining vs Fiat - Estimating GigaWats, Shrinking NanoMeters
by grarpamp 16 May '18

16 May '18

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xmvbq/bitcoin-energy-science-wo… https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6 https://digiconomist.net/ http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitcoin-electricity-consumption/ https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/18/05/16/1713243/nobody-knows-how-much-…

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Cell Carriers Selling and Giving Your Data Out, Breach Expose
by grarpamp 16 May '18

16 May '18

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gykgv9/securus-phone-tracking-co… https://www.zdnet.com/article/us-cell-carriers-selling-access-to-real-time-… https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/technology/cellphone-tracking-law-enforc… https://www.zdnet.com/article/securus-police-cell-phones-warrantless-tracki… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684 https://www.locationsmart.com/try/ Cell carriers are selling access to your real-time phone location data The company embroiled in a privacy row has "direct connections" to all major US wireless carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint -- and Canadian cell networks, too. Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute, explained in a phone call that the Electronic Communications Privacy Act only restricts telecom companies from disclosing data to the government. It doesn't restrict disclosure to other companies, who then may disclose that same data to the government. He called that loophole "one of the biggest gaps in US privacy law." SIM Card Baseband Secrets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31D94QOo2gY

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Julian Assange / WikiLeaks: Surveilled and Arbitrarily Detained
by grarpamp 16 May '18

16 May '18

https://www.theguardian.com/media/julian-assange https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/15/revealed-ecuador-spent-millio… https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/15/17357112/ecuador-embassy-julian-assange-…

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RightsCon 2018: Live Activism and Pursuance Project Panels w/ Brown Drake Jonsdottir et al - via Access Now
by grarpamp 16 May '18

16 May '18

Pursuance Democracy bites back Activists, journalists, and nonprofits of the world -- unite! Here is the URL to our panel's livestream, which is live now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAe-PeEgv8w In general you can find our livestreams at https://www.youtube.com/c/PursuanceProject Our Tech Lead, Steve Phillips, is giving a talk that we're also livestreaming at youtube.com/c/PursuanceProject , at 2:15pm PT / 5:15pm ET today as well! The Background: We're at RightsCon! RightsCon is an international tech and human rights conference, organized by the digital rights NGO Access Now. RightsCon 2018 will take place May 16-18 in Toronto, Canada. Members of the Pursuance team have been invited to speak at not one, but two sessions! Technical lead and project manager Steve Phillips will be presenting a live demo of the Pursuance platform, and Barrett Brown will speak as part of a truly all-star panel covering lessons learned from past activism, plus their visions for 21st century activism. The other panelists include Naomi Colvin (Courage Foundation), Birgitta Jónsdóttir (poetician, spokesperson for the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), and prominent member of the Pirate Party in Iceland), Jesselyn Radack (whistleblower, attorney representing many whistleblowers, and heads the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) at ExposeFacts), Diani Barreto (journalist and researcher on whistleblowing at ExposeFacts and Courage Foundation), and Thomas Drake (NSA whistleblower). Here is the URL to our livestream, which is live now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAe-PeEgv8w In general you can find our livestreams at https://www.youtube.com/c/PursuanceProject We'll keep you updated on Pursuance's developments and the team's activities in the coming weeks and months. Thanks again for your support! Sincerely, The Pursuance Team

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OT is there place on earth where the sun doesn't rise from near east?
by Georgi Guninski 16 May '18

16 May '18

is there place on earth where the sun doesn't rise from near east? counterexample will be near the poles. there are two kinds of poles: geographic pole and magnetic pole. it appears to depend how they are placed: the middle of the line between them is a good candidate -- in this case exchanging them will swap directions.

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extremely stealthy hardware Trojans - existing transistor dopant polarity changes
by Zenaan Harkness 16 May '18

16 May '18

Holy firetruck, Punkman, sh1rts gettin' real: Georg T. Becker, Francesco Regazzoni, Christof Paar, and Wayne P. Burleson in the abstract of a paper [PDF] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13389-013-0068-0 In recent years, hardware Trojans have drawn the attention of governments and industry as well as the scientific community. One of the main concerns is that integrated circuits, e.g., for military or critical-infrastructure applications, could be maliciously manipulated during the manufacturing process, which often takes place abroad. However, since there have been no reported hardware Trojans in practice yet, little is known about how such a Trojan would look like and how difficult it would be in practice to implement one. In this paper we propose an extremely stealthy approach for implementing hardware Trojans below the gate level, and we evaluate their impact on the security of the target device. Instead of adding additional circuitry to the target design, we insert our hardware Trojans by changing the dopant polarity of existing transistors. Since the modified circuit appears legitimate on all wiring layers (including all metal and polysilicon), our family of Trojans is resistant to most detection techniques, including fine-grain optical inspection and checking against "golden chips". We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by inserting Trojans into two designs—a digital post-processing derived from Intel's cryptographically secure RNG design used in the Ivy Bridge processors and a side-channel resistant SBox implementation—and by exploring their detectability and their effects on security. (From LWN Briefs: https://lwn.net/Articles/749980/ )

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[WAR] The West finally gets one up on Russia re torture
by Zenaan Harkness 16 May '18

16 May '18

The reality of empires is eventually, if belatedly, exposed. With Israel massacring dozens with impugnity, the USA's "humanitarian" CIA <ahem>, and now Russia (see below) it's sad days. ** What Moral Standing Do We Have After This Outrage? And Are We About to Join *Another* Idiotic War, Like Feeble Minions? https://russia-insider.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fa2faf7034c3c3c413… ------------------------------------------------------------ by Peter Hitchens (1,513 views) on Tue, May 15, 2018 Typical Russians, eh? They kidnap a man and his pregnant wife in broad daylight, then hide them in a secret prison in an Asian airport where they wield sinister influence. There they begin to torture him. Despite the fact that she is obviously pregnant, they chain her to a wall and put a hood over her head, for five days. Next, they swathe her from head to toe in duct tape (in agony, because one of her eyes is taped open) and fly them both to Syria so he can be tortured more thoroughly for several years. With the two chained and bound prisoners comes a delivery note from the Russian spy chief to his Syrian opposite number: ‘This is the least we could do for you, to demonstrate our remarkable relationship’.

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Haven - Android Physical Space Monitor
by grarpamp 15 May '18

15 May '18

https://guardianproject.github.io/haven/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr0wEsISRUw Haven is for people who need a way to protect their personal spaces and possessions without compromising their own privacy. It is an Android application that leverages on-device sensors to provide monitoring and protection of physical spaces. Haven turns any Android phone into a motion, sound, vibration and light detector, watching for unexpected guests and unwanted intruders. We designed Haven for investigative journalists, human rights defenders, and people at risk of forced disappearance to create a new kind of herd immunity. By combining the array of sensors found in any smartphone, with the world’s most secure communications technologies, like Signal and Tor, Haven prevents the worst kind of people from silencing citizens without getting caught in the act.

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