May 2018 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

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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cypherpunls and guns
by juan 15 May '18

15 May '18

out of the memory hole : ---------- At 12:51 AM -0800 1/6/98, Wei Dai wrote: >I don't understand why there is so much talk about guns here lately. >Unless someone comes up with a weapon that has some very unusual economic >properties, individuals cannot hope to compete with governments in the >domain of deadly force. If we have to resort to physical violence, we've >already lost! People on almost any unmoderated mailing list will talk about what interests them. Those who mainly want to talk about crypto are of course free to do so. (You have, Wei, done important work in this area. But you very, very seldom write articles on this list, at least not for the last couple of years--I count less than one article per month from you over the past half year. I urge you to write such articles if you dislike reading what others are writing.) I agree that two or three or four or five years ago I was much more likely to write about something more crypto-related. Well, much time has passed. Most things worth saying have been said, at least for me. I can't work up the energy to discuss "data havens" a fourth or fifth time. (And an article from me on data havens, or information markets, or crypto anarchy, will usually produce complaints from people who don't see what it has to do with getting the latest version of PGP! That's only a slight exaggeration.) There have also been very few major new participants. A few years ago we could count on one or two major new "talents" joining the list each year, generating articles and new ideas. For whatever reasons, this has nearly stopped. I would guess the reasons are related to a) no major publicity stories as in past years, b) the disintegration of the list a year ago in the wake of the "moderation" fiasco (which cut subscriptions by 3-5x), c) competition from several other crypto lists, "moderated" by their owners, d) exhaustion of the older participants in the battles, and e) those who are interested in our topics have mostly already found us (meaning, the rich hunting period is over). ; >Think about it: if we can defend ourselves with guns, why would we need >crypto? This has an obvious answer. Guns are a last resort. Crypto makes it less likely that Big Brother will know what the proles are talking about, less likely that participants in a plan will be targetted for investigation and raids. Wei, your question could be paraphrased this way: "If Pablo Escobar could defend himself with guns, why did he need crypto in his cellphone?" (The answer being that P. Escobar was detected by using a cellphone without security. The NSA then told the DEA and its allies where he was and they took him out on a rooftop.) Final comment: If I find the motivation, I may finish an essay I've been working on about how we, the Cypherpunks and the World, are *retrogressing* in crypto areas. Most of the exotic applications are no longer being discussed, and various mundane commercial products are the main focus. Yawn. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway." ------------

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