July 2018 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Markets in Assassination?
by jim bell 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

https://reason.com/archives/2018/07/27/markets-in-assassination-everybody-p… Markets in Assassination? Everybody Panic!! July 27, 2018 Declan McCullagh, It's been a few years since the last media scare about prediction markets. So we were overdue for this week's handwringing about Augur, digital currencies, and assassinations. Augur, which has been under development since 2015 and launchedthis month, is a set of smart contracts built on the Ethereum blockchain. It's intentionally decentralized, meaning that anyone can use it to propose wagers, anyone can bet on the outcome, and human judges known as reporters have a financial incentive honestly to decide whether the event happened or not. No central authority exists to reject unacceptable, or illegal, wagers. This week's media scare arose after a single person used the Augur protocol to bet on whether President Donald Trump would survive 2018, and that person apparently placed the bet on a lark after a Twitter discussion. Cue the frightened headlines: The Independent reported: "Donald Trump assassination market appears on blockchain platform Augur." Newsweek: "Welcome to Augur, the cryptocurrency death market where you can bet on a Donald Trump assassination." Mashable may have been the most worried, declaring Augur "terrifying." In reality, Internet assassination markets have existed for years. A Forbes article from 2013 described a self-proclaimed "Assassination Market" that attempted to crowdfund murder with bitcoins. Bounties were established on NSA Director Keith Alexander, President Obama, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (Bernanke's bounty, the highest, would be just over $1 million at today's bitcoin prices). Five years later, those officials are still alive. Human beings can be creative creatures when choosing to do evil, and one day prediction markets may well be used for actual foul play. This is especially true when one person stands to gain a lot from harming another: Murders have been committed to gain life insurance payouts. Worse, prediction markets could reward not only assassins, but criminals involved in mass shootings or terrorist attacks as well. At least these public markets do one thing that underground payments-for-assassination do not: they let the target know that he or she is a target. If you knew that there was a large bet that would pay off only if you died in the next 24 hours, you might want to take the appropriate precautions, including a vigorous exercise of your Second Amendment rights. Hope your state doesn't require a waiting period! (There may be a market in bots that, for a fee, will scour new Augur contracts for your name.) This is probably why the CIA, which presumably never would favor the assassination of a U.S. politician, seems to like prediction markets. A 2006 analysis published by the agency concludes that "the record of prediction markets is impressive." It adds that "prediction markets can contribute to more accurate estimates of long-term trends and threats and better cost-benefit assessments of ongoing or proposed policies." And of course it was the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency that proposed a prediction market based on events such as regime change in the Middle East. George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, whose work partially inspired DARPA, uses the history of short selling to suggest that the danger of foul play in prediction markets is exaggerated. He writes: > Some people suspected that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the New York World Trade Center were funded in part by trades of airline stock options. Similarly, some feared that the 1982 Tylenol poisonings were done to profit from short sales on the Tylenol stock. Airline stock prices did fall on September 11, as did the Tylenol stock with the 1982 poisonings. And a study has found that Israeli stock and currency prices respond to Israeli suicide bombings. Thus, it is not crazy to think that terrorists might use financial markets to profit from their acts. Nevertheless, we know of no examples of anyone using financial markets to profit from such sabotage. The idea of arranging assassinations online through pseudonymous identifiers and paying in digital cash is not exactly new. It's been discussed for nearly a quarter-century. In September 1994, retired Intel engineer and polymath Tim May published The Cyphernomicon, a manifesto that said: "In my highly personal opinion, many people, including most Congressrodents, have committed crimes that earn them the death penalty; I will not be sorry to see anonymous assassination markets used to deal with them." May included assassination markets in his list of what truly anonymous digital cash could accomplish. Such markets, he suggested, were merely one consequence of what the wrecking ball of cryptographic technology would do to the nation-state. Others included illegal markets in gambling, bribes, payoffs, insider trading, contract crimes, fencing, organ selling, and military and trade secrets. On the cypherpunks mailing list, May outlined an experimental scheme called BlackNet to demonstrate anonymous information markets. A few years later, Jim Bell, an MIT-educated anarchist, stepped in where May left off. Bell published a 23-page essay with the provocative title "Assassination Politics." Bell's sketch of how this system would work argued that an "organization could quite legally operate, assisted by encryption, international data networking, and untraceable digital cash, in a way that would (indirectly) hasten the death of named people, for instance hated government employees and officeholders." The Forecast Foundation, the nonprofit group leading Augur's development, has taken some steps to prevent their project from morphing into Assassination Politics or BlackNet. For instance, it added code to allow participants to reject transactions as unethical and therefore "invalid." But different people–the ones acting as reporters–may reach different conclusions about what transactions are unethical or invalid. The creators of Augur call this disagreement a potential fork. If there is a dispute, there are built-in ways to try to resolve it; if it cannot be resolved, the market will be forked over a 60-day period. A March 2018 white paper calls forks a "nuclear option" that "are expected to be exceedingly rare events." If a disagreement over bets on the longevity of politicians ever arises, a Coindesk report suggests there's a "possibility that Augur could fork into two platforms, one–call it Augur Dark–that tolerates assassination markets, and one that doesn't." There are other ways the foundation could try to curb potential illegal wagers, including altering the codebase to inject additional safeguards. But participants in the Augur marketplace would be free to ignore the alterations. An intentionally–even radically–decentralized system is difficult to tame again once it's released into the wild. The foundation has tried to distance itself from unlawful uses of Augur, stressing on its website that it "has no power to censor, restrict, or curate markets, orders, trades, positions or resolutions on the Augur protocol contracts." Earlier this week, it formally relinquished its ability to shut down the network. Now the fate of Augur, and of its associated prediction markets, now in the hands of its users. [end of article] Jim Bell

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[MINISTRY] IQ: Jordan Peterson: high IQ + can use computers = different species
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

A little trite, but Jordan Peterson's insistence on the science of IQ (and clearly explaining it) is fun when interspersed with such colourful descriptions as "if you're really smart, -and- you know how to use a computer, you are so far ahead of people that it's like you're a member of a different species" (at around 22 minutes). Fact based discussion FTW :) Douglas Murray in conversation with Jordan Peterson-NLrFEbXKFh0.webm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLrFEbXKFh0 ~47mins

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DDR4 PHY training binary-blob reverse engineering/ libre reimplementation call to action - Librem 5
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

For those with knowledge, capacity, and will, here is a task for the TODO list, if it's not beyond your ability: Apparently all DDR PHY manifestations require DDR4 "training" to work with DDR4 RAM. Training firmware blobs are currently all proprietary, binary only. The Librem 5 phone folks are not currently with someone who can reverse engineer and/ or reimplement such training firmware, and so are using an i.MX8 secondary CPU to perform this function, using the existing binary blobs. The ideal situation would be someone with enough knowledge etc solving this particular problem with a libre “training firmware” implementation. (Also, TPM-free Purism laptop models currently available on runout sale at ~$300 off - a very rare Purism sale (the TPM chip was so popular, all new models have it included by default).) Solving the first FSF RYF hurdle for the Librem 5 https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-solving-the-first-fsf-ryf-hurdle/ … In U-Boot there are a number of firmware blobs that need to be loaded into the DDR PHY so that it can be trained to work with DDR4. This training is done on every boot. The normal boot sequence for the i.MX 8 is that the internal ROM loader loads the Secondary Program Loader (SPL) which, in this case, is a small version of U-Boot that can initialize the DDR and load the full U-Boot into DDR to finish the boot process. Very early in the SPL, the training blobs get loaded into the DDR PHY and the training sequence is run. The DDR training procedure is completely un-documented so re-writing the firmware blobs with free/libre or open source versions would be an arduous process. We can’t ignore the DDR PHY because it is interface between the i.MX 8 internal buses and the DDR4 chips outside of the SOC. The DDR PHY is also part of the i.MX 8 silicon so we can’t just replace the DDR PHY with a different one. It also appears that all DDR PHY’s required this training to work with DDR4, so going to a different SOC wouldn’t solve it either. ...

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[MONEY] New Rules of the Bond Game - Zerowedgie
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

Clearly put, and with a quote that must be quoted: Perhaps the words of Josiah Stamp, the director of the Bank of England in 1928, are worth revisiting: “Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. … Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with the flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again. “Take this great power away from them and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. “But, if you want to continue to be a slave of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.” The 'Hidden' Rules Of The Bond Game https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-26/new-rules-bond-game

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NSA Watchdog: Surveillance Giant Still Isn’t Securing Its Networks
by Steven Schear 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

https://www.thedailybeast.com/nsa-watchdog-surveillance-giant-still-isnt-se…

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[MINISTRY] fringe Marxist bloggers admit hitting big time at TDS
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

So some fringe bloggers at a fringe deep state lame stream media blog have come clean, admitting to finally hitting the big time as they are covered by your favourite truth site, TDS. Read it and rejoice: Washington Post Jewess Ruth Marcus Confirms That the Daily Stormer is “Big Time” Media https://dailystormer.name/washington-post-jewess-ruth-marcus-confirms-that-…

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[MINISTRY] Unz Review: Gommunist Bolshevik's revolution financing
by Zenaan Harkness 27 Jul '18

27 Jul '18

A little more history comes to light - who woulda thought that J bankers financed the J-Bolshevik revolution in Russia? 1. Your Schoolbooks Lied to You: What Happened After the Bolshevik Revolution (#120th) by Ron Unz The Unz Review https://russia-insider.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fa2faf7034c3c3c413… ------------------------------------------------------------ by Ron Unz The Unz Review (1,679 views) on Thu, Jul 26, 2018 The author is the founder and editor of the Unz Review, a conservative American political website, an entrepreneur, and a one-time candidate for the governor of California. This article was originally published in October 2016 at the Unz Review. Although I always had a great interest in history, I naively believed what I read in my textbooks, and therefore regarded American history as just too bland and boring to study.

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Re: [Cryptography] Cryptokitties: When you've still got money to burn after investing in all those ICOs
by grarpamp 26 Jul '18

26 Jul '18

On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 1:47 AM, Rui Paulo via cryptography <cryptography(a)metzdowd.com> wrote: > On Mon, 2018-07-23 at 08:17 +0000, Peter Gutmann wrote: >> Dammit, why didn't I think of that? Just as the bottom is falling >> out of >> ICOs, someone comes up with a new way to extract money out of the >> gullible. >> >> https://www.cryptokitties.co/ >> >> tl;dr: >> >> 1. Use actual real money to buy Ethereum. >> 2. Use Ethereum to buy a cryptokitty. >> 3. ?? >> 4. ?? >> 5. No, not profit, just more ?? >> > > http://cryptopuppies.org/ Funny how this list will approve, 1up, and talk about the above [1], yet censor actual discussion of more serious areas of cryptocurrency, (note such with BTC being early on this list), which are in fact material relavant to the "technical, social, political, security, privacy, legal, and multinational aspects of cryptosystems' of its charter. [1] which are btw old way news now having been out for ten months, for which people are still rightfully free to evaluate investing in, using them as currency, or collect / trade / dispose on whim as deemed fit. bcc cypherpunks, to witness esteemed lolcat and cute puppy posters approved into the censorship / irony / fud log... and where you're actually free to cover relavant 'crypto' currency material, and even trade cryptokitties :)

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Signal on the Desktop, Plays FBI Subpoena
by grarpamp 26 Jul '18

26 Jul '18

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/10/04/2144202/encryption-app-signal-wins… http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/signal-subpoena-privacy-gag-order/ https://apnews.com/2bed090d3ec042cab375278b636ff5e5/US-subpoena-tests-priva… http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/technology/subpoenas-and-gag-orders-show-… https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/open_whisper_docume… Signal, widely considered the gold standard of encrypted messaging apps, was put to the test earlier this year when a FBI subpoena and gag order that demanded a wide range of information on two users resulted in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia. The makers of Signal, Open Whisper Systems, profoundly disappointed law enforcement. The app collects as little data as possible and therefore was unable to hand anything useful over to agents. "That's not because Signal chose not to provide logs of information," ACLU lawyer Brett Kaufman told the Associated Press. "It's just that it couldn't." "The Signal service was designed to minimize the data we retain," Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Open Whisper Systems, told the New York Times. The subpoena came with a yearlong gag order that was successfully challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union. Signal's creators challenged the gag order as unconstitutional, "because it is not narrowly tailored to a compelling government interest." The challenge was successful. In addition to being popularly considered the best consumer encrypted messaging app available, Signal's technology is used by Facebook for Secret Conversations, WhatsApp for encrypted messages, and Google's Allo. Confronted with the subpoena, Marlinspike went to the ACLU for legal counsel. The ACLU responded with a letter saying that even though Signal did not have data the FBI sought, it still strenuously objected (PDF) to the fact the FBI wanted so much information.

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Monopolies are made by government and they can easily be broken by them too
by Steven Schear 26 Jul '18

26 Jul '18

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/18/eu-fine-google-android-a… Instead of fining Google, if the EU really wants to set and example of how to reign in monopolies, they should recind the IP privilege they granted Google by stripping them of their copyrights (and perhaps patents).

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