May 2019 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

ACLU: Border Agents Violate Constitution When They Search Electronic Devices
by jim bell 03 May '19

03 May '19

It seems to me that one possible solution is to back up your phone onto an micro-SD card (possibly one other than the one you usually have installed), using an app to do this, and wiping most of the phone except for some functions.. (I'm assuming this is already available, or could be written if this is big issue for many people.) Micro-SD cards of 128 Gigabytes capacity are now about $20, and they are so small that they could easily fit behind most postage stamps, on envelopes. Those about as old as me (61), or older, probably remember when "micro-dots" were a big plot element in spy novels, probably the 1950s and 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdot Then, it was considered remarkable that a page of text could be photo-reduced in this way, possibly being stuck behind a postage stamp. A 128 gigabyte micro-SD card can hold the equivalent of about 16,000 Encyclopedia-Britannica-sized volumes. (Which, of course, dates me too: Many kids today have probably never seen a paper encyclopedia...) A week ago, I got to the end of watching the TV series, "The Americans" about a Russian couple who act as spies in Washington D.C. for 25+ years. Inspired by a 2010 case from Seattle, I believe. My main objection to the plot of the series is that they repeatedly had to kill people merely to ensure their continued anonymity. My understanding is that there are drugs which can erase a person's day's waking memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(drug-related_amnesia)This would allow them to interrogate someone else, and then deliberately cause him to forget the recent incident. No need to kill anyone. Jim Bell https://www.npr.org/2019/05/02/719337356/aclu-border-agents-violate-constit… [partial quote follows] The American Civil Liberties Union says it has uncovered new evidence that federal border agents are violating the Constitution when they search travelers' electronic devices. The ACLU, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the federal government in 2017, alleging that its "warrantless and suspicionless searches" of electronic devices at the U.S. ports of entry violated the First and Fourth amendments. Lawyers now say that, through depositions of border agents, they have learned that the scope of the warrantless searches has expanded far beyond the mere enforcement of immigration and customs laws. Border officers have the authority to search belongings for contraband, or to determine who is admissible into the U.S., the ACLU said. But agents now "claim authority to search travelers' devices for general law enforcement purposes, such as looking for potential evidence of illegal activity beyond violations of immigration and customs laws," plaintiffs wrote. "That claimed authority extends to enforcing 'hundreds' of federal laws, including tax, bankruptcy, environmental, and consumer protection laws. Defendants' asserted purposes for conducting warrantless or suspicionless device searches also include intelligence gathering or advancing pre-existing investigations." These practices violate the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the ACLU wrote. They also violate the First Amendment, attorneys said, because people traveling to the U.S. might censor themselves, knowing that a border agent might look through their phone.[end of partial quote]

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Bloomberg: China's Mass Surveillance More Sophisticated Than Thought
by jim bell 03 May '19

03 May '19

Bloomberg: China's Mass Surveillance More Sophisticated Than Thought. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-01/alibaba-backed-face-scan…

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The solution to quantum computers cracking cryptography — Quartz
by jim bell 03 May '19

03 May '19

https://qz.com/1605685/the-solution-to-quantum-computers-cracking-cryptogra…

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Cryptocurrency: Austrian Econ via Jeffrey Tucker
by grarpamp 02 May '19

02 May '19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oahuySIGIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_bRHBa5QEo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlPJYFcz7ec It's a Jetson's World, and other relations in popular vids... https://www.youtube.com/user/LibertyInOurTime/videos

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Assange Court Rulings
by John Young 02 May '19

02 May '19

R v Julian Assange (Bail Act offence) Sentencing Remarks of HHJ Deborah Taylor Southwark Crown Court 1 May 2019 https://cryptome.org/2019/05/assange-sentencing-2019-0501 Related: https://cryptome.org/2019/05/sureties-julian-assange-08102012.pdf https://cryptome.org/2019/05/assange-ruling-6-feb-2018.pdf https://cryptome.org/2019/05/assange-ruling-2-13-feb-2018.pdf

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Re: Demonstration of a tinc network linked through Tor v3 onions
by grarpamp 02 May '19

02 May '19

>> It can be communitied, or forked. > Seems unlikely. Either can work if people want them to, that is the very point of opensource if so merited. >>> Reported bugs have been closed without action. >> What ticket numbers are of interest? > https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24902 > https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/19966 > https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24973 > I can't find the one where they explicitly said that it's not worth fixing > v2-specific bugs. Statements always nice to have for reference. Bugs not needing architecture rework should be fixed. >>> Fetches of v2 rendezvous descriptors fail, and so OnionCat services are "unavailable". > Analysis? Not really, just lots of notices logs. Basically the same stuff as > in #19966. Lots of it. Any tickets should be revalidated using current release on unix, then bumped if still valid to get them fixed. The version issues below can be gamed as needed if applicable. > how tinc uses onion circuits vs how OnionCat does. They're just apps bound to onions, no special knowledge of tor. There can be things like layer 2/3/+ keepalive packets, etc going on depending on the app. Circuit timeout settings, etc. See also OnionBalance regarding overall subject. > Or maybe v3 onions work better than v2 onions, either because > they're better designed, or better supported. v2 is still in the code and will be for a long time, even possibly modularized for third parties indefinitely. So if there are v2 problems, ticket them, join together, and get them fixed. > It's also possible that I've tested them differently. With OnionCat, I was > using Freenet. And with tinc, I've used bittorrent. So maybe Freenet and > bittorrent have different enough packet dynamics. Tests should only change one variable at a time. > I initially picked that IPv4 range because of ChaosVPN. But maybe it'd be > better to integrate with dn42, and use IPv6 IPv4 is dead, IPv6 gives much more room for people to play without colliding with each other or other things... lots of people's stacks and private usage treat RFC1918 as their own, not that of some third party apps (which really need to use their own space outside of RFC1918, etc). So you need more space. Overlays can use either 4/6 on clearnet and emulate either 4/6//N-bits for internal use, and can also setup separate instances integrating into each. IPv6 has some space options, and lots of unallocated slack space. But also search "AF_OVERLAY" for a grander more universal overlay interop scheme than even IPv6 can ever provide. > What worries me is that the Tor community will see this Though exit is and should be a priority in tor at the moment given the gamut of todays overlays, tor does not, should not, and won't have exclusive claim to that functionality in both other currently developing and future overlay networks. > as DDoS, and implement blocks. tor-0.3.2.9 was the last version without some statistical blocking changelog 0.3.2.10: "denial-of-service mitigation" > I wonder whether they've done that with OnionCat. No. Tor can't pick out apps like that, only patterns, those can be really hard for an overlay (like tor) to discern, and impeding of many false positive users. Fork tor if tor censors people (they've already tried to censor relay operators and posters for speaking freely). Say to a non-corporate more globally volunteer opensource tor. Or simply support the development of and migrate to better more resistant overlay networks going forward. Diversity in designs, and with more deployed overlay networks in live competition, are important. Anyway, happy hacking :)

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Cryptocurrency: Deconomy 2019
by grarpamp 02 May '19

02 May '19

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_HZkGAEXMobMwRtz_3SlFw/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHTVsdky_U3B3ZpTV4vDHLA/videos

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Cypherpunks nameserver changes will happen Wednesday
by Greg Newby 01 May '19

01 May '19

Dearest colleagues, Riad and I are planning on coordinating some changes to the DNS entries for the cpunks.org domain, sometime during US business hours on May 1. Basically, we will be splitting out lists.cpunks.org (the PGLAF.org server, which I run and is where this list lives) as a subdomain in the DNS, separately from the rest of cpunks.org (which Riad runs, and mostly redirects to lists.cpunks.org anyway). If the change goes well, nothing noticeable will happen and emails to the list will continue to flow. If the change goes poorly, there might be some email messages that bounce or are delayed. I will send an email update to the list when the change is done, to test that things are working. Once things have been working for a few days, I will then make some updates to the DNS records to improve adherence to modern email anti-spam "standards" (DKIM, SPF and DMARC). This should cut down on messages that are quarantined or rejected by many large email providers. Those anti-spam measures are a good topic for discussion. They have some merit in identifying the validity of the servers that messages come from. But they don't help with validating the sender, or non-repudiation, or other features that have existed at least as long as PGP. It's not easy to run your own mail transport agent these days. Here is a little article from some other victims of the behemoth ISPs: https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_is_eating_our_ma… Best wishes for a Happy May Day, to all. - Greg

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Julian Assange Sentenced to 50 Weeks and Still Faces U.S. Charges
by Cecilia Tanaka 01 May '19

01 May '19

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/world/europe/julian-assange-sentence-uk.… ---------- Loving. Caring. Sharing. Being Excellent To Each Other And To Our Hackerspace. <3 ---------- "Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live." - Mae Jemison

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useless eaters - oxygen thieves - carbon polluters → useless dirt proliferators - oxygen polluters - carbon thieves
by Zenaan Harkness 01 May '19

01 May '19

What's it like to be a useless eater oxygen thief carbon poll/uter? Or "human ≡ evil"? And what about those carbon thieving, oxygen pollutin' useless dirt proliferators? Seriously, "trees ≡ evil" their leaves turn into dirt, they pollute our world with an abundance of fire promoting oxygen, and these so called "green" trees are stealing so much carbon from the atmosphere it's not funny... Life couldn't just be a matter of perspective, could it? Perhaps, in this thing some folk call reality, we actually live within a symbiotic, perfectly complementary natural wonderland? (Actual etc problems notwithstanding...)

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