September 2019 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Spain to Catalonia: voting is illegal
by Zenaan Harkness 22 Oct '19

22 Oct '19

OK, ok, slight exaggeration - voting in a secession referendum is illegal, says Spain to Catalonia. Since only States are sovereign, and not people (say the States), secessionist referenda are illegal. And besides, it's for your safety. Crimea is a case in point - with a few million bullets fired, blood on the streets and carnage the world has rarely seen, Crimeans paid a high price for the reuniting with Russia. Oh, it didn't quite go like that? Oh well, you know, voting is illegal and all... and the State of Ukraine murdering it's own people in a genocidal attempt to cause them to "reunite" with the other land, we have a prime example of why the State must, at all times, be granted ultimate sovereignty, and the people must be dominated with bullets. And missiles. And land mines, shelling, RPGs and everything else the state can muster, to establish order in the world. "Democracy" loving Westerners both decry the Crimean's zero bullet referendum (what a concept), whilst demanding the USA's "God" given right to impose "democracy" by missile upon any unsuspecting nation State that has some excess oil. Or lots of non-excess oil that the USA wants. Or other resources... And on and on the Western "moral high ground" hypocrisy goes... Cue another ridiculous jnn rant in 3 ... 2 ... What a world we live in. Catalonia sets date for landmark vote on independence from Spain https://www.rt.com/news/391627-catalonia-independence-vote-date/ The autonomous region of Catalonia will have the decisive referendum on secession from Spain on October 1, the regional government announced on Friday. The move comes after a months-long standoff with Madrid, which decries the vote as illegal.

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Re: Richard Stallman Gets SJW'd
by Zenaan Harkness 13 Oct '19

13 Oct '19

On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 11:26:23AM -0400, Ric Moore wrote: > On 9/17/19 9:56 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote: > > > RMS, founder and originator of the Free Software Foundation, did not > > have sufficient support for his simple and straightforward words > > about words used to conflate or mislead readers (or listeners) about > > Epstein or anyone else for that matter, and RMS has now resigned from > > the FSF. > > Would you trust RMS to babysit your 8 year old daughter? I bet not. His > biggest problem is that he has spouted off for way too many years without > being hauled to task for what comes forth from his mouth. He's an idiot, plain > and simple, for ignoring "convention" and separating himself from "polite > society". No need for me to go into detail, it's all just a google away. Ric Actually yes and without hesitation - I hosted RMS in Sydney some 20 years ago (spent a few days with him in total), and despite him being a little "conversationally confronting", including to me personally, he was principled, precise, and caring of other humans, all to a fault. He gets taken the wrong way sometimes and I get that - haven't we all? So I did a google for "rms stallman egregious" and came up with the below -- all I can see is talk of "precise", email, discussion, and -implications- therein. And some people got upset or felt confronted and ultimately hold that RMS "should be taken down" and that "it's good RMS lost his job at the FSF, who gives a rat's arse if he founded it". Neither robust, nor permitting of robust conversations, nor "intellectually honest", as far as I can tell! I believe it is NOT appropriate that we lynch anyone merely for differing points of view! This is freedom of speech at its absolute most basic. Either we hold to the principle, or we are sluts to safe spaces, cowering pathetically to the snowflakes of the world. No, thank you, but no. Really, no! That is not me. Here's to the right of not only RMS, but you, I and everyone else, to say and argue for and against, whatetever they bloody well choose to. This is the world -I- want to live in. https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/comments/d7v1kf/a_reflection_on_t… > While it is true we should not treat Minsky unfairly, it was > not — and is not — a pressing concern, and by making it his > concern, RMS signaled clearly that it was much more important > to him than the question of the institution’s patterns of > problematic coddling of bad behavior. RMS did merely take part in a mailing list discussion, it's the media that blew it up. It's not like he stepped on a pedestal, creating big signals. It's about as public as talking to people in a coffee shop with a journalist eaves dropping in the background. It's a shame really, we can only have those slick politician like lizard tongue PR people in leading positions. The most important quality today is being dishonest and persuasive at the same time, getting away with it. That's how we got the corporate landscape today, that late stage capitalism where politics, media and industry are all alike, all keeping each other in position rather than in check, all infected with the disease of our times. It's disgusting, one ticket to the moon please... [And the 3rd comment, most poignant indeed:] I don't understand why society has accepted this concept of "you said a thing I don't like so you don't get to have a job anymore". Like what does one's personal opinions have to do with their job, as long as they're doing their job why does it matter. [And perhaps most telling - the "ba da bing, ba da BOOM":] Per Wikipedia, this guy [A KEY RECENT COMPLAINTANT ABOUT RMS] was fired by Stallman in 2001 for failing to perform any work or respond to emails. Did he last speak to Stallman 18 years ago? If not, when? I'd take this account with a huge grain of very salty salt! https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/cr2en6/i_generally_support… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055756 That's what makes me so furious at the morons who deplatformed RMS over some silly devil's advocate defense of Minsky on an internal mailing list. The guy has an important idea that he put most of his life into developing. In the process, he made programming much more inclusive than anyone could dream about in the days of proprietary operating system with compilers that sold for thousands of dollars. So even if having to deal with a difficult old man makes you feel a little less inclusive, it's not too crazy to give him some breaks. The kids who ran him out of town only know how to destroy, not how to create anything comparable to what he did. ... It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting breaks for 30 years. That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't. ... > Which things specifically, and in what way? Saying that we shouldn't call sexual assault "sexual assault", and implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his friend's trafficking victim. The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than harm in what happened to Giuffre perpetuates rape culture. It perpetuates the idea that women are worth less than men, and that it's okay for famous men in CS to rape girls. That emboldens other rapists and makes CS very unwelcoming for rape victims. Minsky should have known. Implying there's any way what he did was okay creates an unwelcoming environment for women, especially young women and girls at MIT. (Background and links from https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... ) ... > implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man > can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has > extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his > friend's trafficking victim. ...what are the scare quotes for? Is "have sex with" not a definitional superset of "rape"? As far as I can tell, Stallman does not assert that Giuffre was not raped, only that Minsky would probably not have known. (As far as he knew, she could equally have been one year older and legally, voluntarily engaged in prostitution...?) You could argue that (and I think that if Minsky did indeed have sex with her, you would have a very good case) that Minsky was extremely naive and/or irresponsible to not suspect anything amiss in the setting, but sexual (or any other) assault, in the view of many people, requires intent to harm someone against their will. Here, it seems that the intent, and hence the primary guilt for the assault, most likely was squarely with Epstein and his associates: if a gun salesman takes you to his shooting range and tells you to fire a weapon at a target that he actually secretly tied a person to the back of, and you shoot that person dead, you are not on the hook for murder even if you should really have known that something is off and recall hearing muffled screams from somewhere at one point in hindsight. > The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important > than harm in what happened to Giuffre Where did Stallman claim that? [NEVER GOT ANSWERED]

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"the biggest and fastest computers" - Fwd: What They Haven't Told You about Climate Change - Patrick More - Trump was right again
by Zenaan Harkness 02 Oct '19

02 Oct '19

OK I fess up, the subject takes a quote directly from the 'tube - but this monologue by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick More is mostly about that dreaded of all dreadeds <spooky musak please> Climate ... Change This one, despite its references to big computers, is worth forwarding to yer ma. ----- Forwarded message from Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> ----- From: Gil May <gilmay97(a)gmail.com> Date: Sun, 29 Sep 2019 18:00:19 +1000 Subject: Fwd: What They Haven't Told You about Climate Change *What They Haven't Told You about Climate Change* Patrick More co-founder of Greenpeace for Prager University https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkdbSxyXftc&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0C7… ----- End forwarded message -----

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How LRAD Went From a Pirate Deterrent to a Police Crowd-Control Tool
by jim bell 01 Oct '19

01 Oct '19

It's possible this could be fought by building a fairly large corner-cube retroreflector and aiming it at the source of the sound. While that might not be precise, it would send a lot of sound back to the area around the emitter. Jim Bell https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-lrad-went-from-a-pirate-deterrent-to-…

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The Tragedy of Groupthink
by Ryan Carboni 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

Few realizes this, but narcissists think themselves to be a group of one. This makes their defect more apparent as there is no such thing. Normal groups are large, they seek to accrue more resources, they are never at fault. To point out something for which they'd be at fault for (it can't be true because I would have noticed it) is impossible, possibly because it mean the group would have to split. How do groups get convinced? The Nazis got convinced when guns were shoved in their faces. No doubt just one year before the end of WWII, they would neither believe defeat could occur or that the Holocaust was ongoing. It does reveal a toothlessness when facing any sizeable group that is completely incorrect.

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Rob Braxman Privacy Guy on Librem
by grarpamp 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

https://twitter.com/robbraxmantech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEMKeJ5zfow I'm the Internet Privacy Guy. Our privacy is being invaded on the Internet. Soon it will be non-existent. Soon the singularity will control you. Your threats include doxxing, hacking, mass surveillance, profiling, cybersecurity threats, weaponized data mining and AI. Hear the TRUTH! And not the FAKE NEWS from shills and supporters of Corporate and Government data mining. I also discuss alternative communication modes especially with a prepper focus. I have a prepper communications playlist where I discuss HAM radio, SDR, QRP modes, Digital modes when running portable. I am a General Class licensed HAM radio operator. Are you ready for when the Internet or the entire grid is down? Join me on my LIVE STREAM every Friday-Monday 8-10pm Pacific Time. I release videos on the days when I'm not live streaming. Contact me on http://rob.brax.me https://brax.me/home/rob Contact Me Directly (Secure) https://bytzvpn.com/ Premium VPN with Cloud-Based TOR Routing https://whatthezuck.net/

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MS Bitlocker Diss SSD Crypto, ISPs Diss DNS Crypto, Sidewalk U1 Spies, CheckM8 Jailbreak
by grarpamp 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/bitlocker-encrypts-self-encrypting-ssds,4… https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/crypto-failure-cripp… Microsoft gives up on SSD manufacturers: Windows will no longer trust drives that say they can encrypt themselves, BitLocker will default to CPU-accelerated AES encryption instead. This is after an exposé on broad issues with firmware-powered encryption Of course it has never been safe to trust any closed source hardware encryption, or Microsoft's closed source Bitlocker NSA_KEY. https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-draws-house-antitrust-scrutiny-of-inter… https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/democrats.judiciary.house.gov/files/docum… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_over_HTTPS While Google says it's pushing for adoption of the technology to prevent spying and spoofing, House investigators are worried this would give the internet giant an unfair advantage by denying access to users' data. The House sent a letter on September 13th asking if Google would use data handled through the process for commercial purposes... Internet service providers are worried that they may be shut out of the data and won't know as much about their customers' traffic patterns. This could "foreclose competition in advertising and other industries," an alliance of ISPs told Congress in a September 19th letter... Mozilla also wants to use the format to secure DNS in Firefox, and the company's Marshall Erwin told the WSJ that the antitrust gripes are "fundamentally misleading." ISPs are trying to undermine the standard simply because they want continued access to users' data, Erwin said. Unencrypted DNS helps them target ads by tracking your web habits, and it's harder to thwart DNS tracking than cookies and other typical approaches. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/amazon-sidewalk-apple-u1-networks Sidewalk, Amazon's new low-bandwidth long-range wireless networking protocol, and Apple's new position- and distance-measuring U1 chip (mentioned in a recent keynote). Apple's U1 chip -- which allows precise, indoor positional tracking via the latest iPhones and will power, at the very least, directional AirDrop file-sharing -- popped up on screen but was never even mentioned. The interest-piquing phrase "GPS at the scale of your living room" was saved for the online iPhone product pages rather than the bombast of the Steve Jobs Theater... Both Amazon and Apple have the hardware scale to build up the base of access points needed to create a useful network before reaching out to, most likely, iOS developers in Apple's case, and hardware makers already on board with Alexa in Amazon's case. For Amazon, in fact, that work has already begun as Sidewalk originally came out of the Ring team's ambition to extend its connected security devices out into gardens. "Ring lighting was the first time we ran into it as a company, because we wanted to extend out onto the sidewalk," says Daniel Rausch, VP of smart home at Amazon (which owns Ring). The smart outoor Ring lights are already out. Products like the Smart Floodlight and Pathlight list a "wireless connection to the Ring Bridge" in the tech specs but eagle-eyed Ring owners had already started to figure out what band Amazon was playing with for this connection, before the Sidewalk announcement. "They've been using an internal version of the protocol on the freely available and unlicensed 900MHz part of the spectrum already," explains Rausch. "What we realised was 'woah, we can actually do something special'. We can make a version of this protocol which is secure and have this unbelievably ubiquitous coverage if we bring it all together, neighbours and neighbours and neighbours...." An innocent smart dog tracker like Ring Fetch fits perfectly into this model of Amazon-networked communities sharing video, alerts and location tracking. https://github.com/axi0mX/ipwndfu http://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/09/27/tethered-jailbreaks-are-back/ EPIC JAILBREAK: Introducing checkm8 (read "checkmate"), a permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit for hundreds of millions of iOS devices. Most generations of iPhones and iPads are vulnerable: from iPhone 4S (A5 chip) to iPhone 8 and iPhone X (A11 chip).

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Decrypted: FB Whatsapp Give Decrypted Encrypted Msgs to UK US Circular SpyOps
by grarpamp 30 Sep '19

30 Sep '19

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/facebook-whatsapp-will-have-to-share-messages-w… Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter. The accord, which is set to be signed by next month, will compel social media firms to share information to support investigations Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals, and called on social media firms to develop “back doors” to give intelligence agencies access to their messaging platforms.

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Encryption and anonymity as top tools for images of child sexual abuse
by John Young 29 Sep '19

29 Sep '19

NYTimes lengthy report on out of control growth of images of child sexual abuse highlights encryption and anonymity as premier tools for avoiding discovery, prosecution and shutdown. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html Silicon Valley giants are pilloried for failing to bar abusers.

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This New Chip Could Bridge The Gap Between Classical And Quantum Computing
by jim bell 29 Sep '19

29 Sep '19

https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0MxjlMVw?s=a3&pd=02h1yVjC This New Chip Could Bridge The Gap Between Classical And Quantum Computing sciencealert.com Quantum computers exist today, although they're limited, cut-down versions of what we hope fully blown quantum computers are going to be able to do in the future. Shared from News Break

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