January 2020 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Haunted by Cybersects
by Razer 30 Jan '20

30 Jan '20

For the record I differ with the author about their statement the "Children of God" was a "Christian sex cult", or related to the vastly wealthy Congressional Prayer Breakfast-sponsoring "The Family". "Oddly enough, Heaven’s Gate—the cult that became infamous in the 1990s—funded itself through web design, via a front company called Higher Source. Indeed, the web was an integral part of the cult, leading cultural theorist Paul Virilio to deem it a “cybersect,” a religious fringe movement marked by an extensive use of the internet to congregate or proselytize. The Heaven’s Gate website, like the Space Jam website, is a primo example of ’90s web-iana. It has the quintessential starry background—a common feature of Geocities-era websites, but particularly poignant when used on the page of a UFO death cult. A “RED ALERT” gif zooms in and out above the proclamation “HALE-BOPP brings closure to: Heaven’s Gate”—referring to the mass suicide committed by members in order to (they believed) evacuate the earth and exit their “physical vehicles” (bodies) by hitching a ride on a spaceship trailing behind the passing comet Hale-Bopp, which made its closest approach to earth on March 22, 1997. The Heaven’s Gate website is lovingly maintained (including, as of 2016, the answering of email inquiries) by two remaining members of the cult, who believe that those who traveled to the “Next Level” (another plane of existence reminiscent of heaven) in 1997 will return to earth, offering passage to anyone who wants to join them. Taking a deep dive on the Heaven’s Gate website is difficult. During the many times throughout the years that I’ve remembered its existence, I could never muster up the courage to click through the links on the home page. It was too surreal, too close to death; a more superstitious person might say the website feels haunted, and probing it would be like disturbing a graveyard. Part of me was irrationally worried that what I would find inside there would make sense to me, that I would get sucked into the world of Do and Ti (the monikers of Heaven’s Gate’s founders) unironically. One thing, however, causes me, and others, to persevere deeper into this dark corner of the web: the need to understand why these people did what they did. Why would they commit mass suicide in tracksuits and Nike Decades? One page, titled “Our Position Against Suicide,” is particularly chilling; the last paragraph becomes a tool to justify mass death: “The true meaning of ‘suicide’ is to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered.” The Heaven’s Gate website led me to wonder about the web presence of the other notorious cults that captured the public imagination in the 1990s. While some millenarian sects like the Branch Davidians lack a web presence, two others—the infamous Christian sex cult Children of God (now called The Family International or TFI) and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese group responsible for the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks—both continue to exist (unlike Heaven’s Gate), albeit as reformed or reorganized groups, and both continue to have web presences. All of these websites are equally displaced in internet-time." Continued: https://thebaffler.com/kate-takes/haunted-by-cybersects-wagner

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Psychonauts Tripping to Santa Cruz, Oakland, Denver
by grarpamp 30 Jan '20

30 Jan '20

https://abcnews.go.com/US/santa-cruz-decriminalizes-psychedelic-mushrooms/s… https://abcnews.go.com/Health/johns-hopkins-university-announces-center-psy… http://www.decrimca.org/ "cultures around the world have long respected entheogenic plants and fungi for providing healing, knowledge, creativity and spiritual connection with nature" "acknowledging the impact that the war on drugs has had on communities while at the same time giving people the liberty to choose how to address their medical needs, providing a potent tool to address issues like PTSD, addiction, and depression" Who got dibs on rayz 1968 pink couch...

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Facialized: The Art of Decepticon Resistance
by grarpamp 30 Jan '20

30 Jan '20

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The Verge: Google’s US antitrust worries could be entering a more serious phase
by jim bell 30 Jan '20

30 Jan '20

The Verge: Google’s US antitrust worries could be entering a more serious phase. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/27/21083341/google-antitrust-state-investig…

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Many Happy returns! Redux
by Razer 30 Jan '20

30 Jan '20

4:35 pm PST Jan 29 2020 bash ping cypherpunks.org returns 50.63.202.63 aka ip.secureserver.net aka Godaddy AriFuckingZona.

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SciTechDaily: First All-Optical “Stealth” Encryption Technology Developed
by jim bell 29 Jan '20

29 Jan '20

SciTechDaily: First All-Optical “Stealth” Encryption Technology Developed. https://scitechdaily.com/first-all-optical-stealth-encryption-technology-de…

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WIRED: One Small Fix Would Curb Stingray Surveillance
by jim bell 29 Jan '20

29 Jan '20

WIRED: One Small Fix Would Curb Stingray Surveillance. https://www.wired.com/story/stingray-surveillance-cell-tower-pre-authentica…

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Cryptocurrencies: alpha-11 US-Public System released
by other.arkitech 29 Jan '20

29 Jan '20

I've released version alpha-11 of US-PUBLIC SYSTEM network. Feedback, testers, welcome http://otheravu4v6pitvw.onion/ Thank you. -- Other Arkitech

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Ann Frank's step-sister admits "none [of the Auschwitz photos] were taken at the concentration camp" - [PEACE]
by Zig the N.g 29 Jan '20

29 Jan '20

In a desperate attempt to keep the dream alive, anuddah fake arse jigga literally gone exposed another round of fakery - fake Auschwitz photos to be precise - all of them ones with any relation to Ann Frank! Welp, j.ggers gonna j.g! Fake Liberation Photos: Anne Frank’s Step-Sister Admits It was All a Giant Con http://dstormer6em3i4km.onion/fake-photos-anne-franks-step-sister-admits-it… https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7933509/Anne-Franks-step-sister-… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-JM6ChF-Fw [literal fake Auschwitz "liberation" photo not attached] “Make it look real, lads! Act more oppressed.” On British television Monday morning, Anne Frank’s step-sister admitted it was all a giant con. Daily Mail: A Holocaust survivor has claimed that photos showing the liberation of Auschwitz aren’t real, because none were taken at the concentration camp. Anne Frank’s step-sister Eva Schloss, 90, who was sent to the notorious camp in Nazi-occupied Poland at the age of 15, appeared on Good Morning Britain today to discuss the 75th anniversary of its liberation. Eva was 23-years-old when her mother Fritzi married Otto Frank, making her the posthumous stepsister to Anne Frank, who had died eight years earlier in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. She spent eight months at Auschwitz before the camp was liberated, and avoided being taken on a death march by the Nazis who fled with prisoners to try to cover up their crimes, because she and her mother overslept and were left behind. Wow, getting out of a death march just by oversleeping? The game must have been on Easy mode. And “taken on a death march by the Nazis to cover up their crimes”? Does that make any sense? Must have been like the death march Elie Wiesel went on but somehow didn’t die from, the one where he voluntarily preferred to go with his evil Nazi oppressors rather than wait for his Soviet liberators to show up. (Shortly before going to the nearest big town with his camp-mates to find some German girls to rape https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/books/review/Donadio-t.html .) However, the survivor has alleged that pictures of Soviet Red Army liberating the camp are fake, because Russian soldiers hadn’t brought cameras, and says there was a heavy snowfall at Auschwitz at the time, which isn’t shown in pictures. She claimed that the photos, which apparently show the liberation, were in fact taken at other camps, but she didn’t give an explain her theory further in the interview. Like the Frank family, Eva and her family were discovered hiding in Amsterdam and Eva was sent to the notorious camp in Nazi-occupied Poland at the age of 15 She said: ‘It wasn’t just Auschwitz , they liberated all the camps in Poland and that is really not known. ‘Another thing I wanted to point out, there are many pictures about the Russians liberating Auschwitz and there’s never any snow. ‘The snow was honestly that high, I was at the Russian embassy once and I said “Something puzzles me, those photos are fake”. ‘They said, “Well yes, they are not fakes”, but when the army came they didn’t have cameras they didn’t take photographs. [Recuperation Block photo not attached] “Schonungsblock” = Recuperation block. Strange thing at an “extermination camp”, no? Eva appeared on Good Morning Britain today to discuss the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation ‘Only much later they took pictures, you see now, but this is definitely not in Auschwitz and not the liberation of Auschwitz.’ [chubby cheeked boys and girls "Auschwitz" photo not attached] Chubby-cheeked children, looking remarkably well-nourished as they are “liberated” Here’s the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-JM6ChF-Fw Notice the host tries to interrupt her when she starts saying the photos were fake, but she just continues speaking over him. There’s still a lot of nonsense in her account of her experience. She complains her mother was selected to be “gassed” by Mengele himself (amazing how these people always have personal encounters with Mengele). But she met her mother later on, still alive and ungassed. Somehow the gassing didn’t work. Maybe they ran out of gas. Or maybe she overslept that day and the inefficient Germans just let her off. Very oddly, Auschwitz "survivors" are repeatedly calling for shutdowns on free speech! "Shut it down" - now who could have predicted this? Auschwitz “Survivors” Call for a Shut Down on Free Speech January 28, 2020 http://dstormer6em3i4km.onion/auschwitz-survivors-call-for-a-shut-down-on-f…

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Secure Phones, Telco, Spies, Baseband, SDR (re: Tower Fix Wont Curb Surveillance)
by grarpamp 29 Jan '20

29 Jan '20

> "WIRED: One Small Fix Would Curb Stingray Surveillance. > > One Small Fix Would Curb Stingray Surveillance > '''The telecom and tech industries could overcome these challenges if they > decided to prioritize a fix. That's a big if. Nasser points to a solution > that would function a lot like HTTPS web encryption, allowing phones to > quickly check cell tower "certificates" to prove their legitimacy before > establishing a secure connection. Last year, Hussain and colleagues from > Purdue and the University of Iowa developed and proposed such an > authentication scheme for the bootstrapping process in 5G." > "As long as phones will connect to anything advertising itself as a > tower, it’s kind of free-for-all," Nasser says. "This problem is > big low-hanging fruit, and there are many ways things could get better > I think." Authenticating to the tower doesn't get users one single bit closer to the trustable p2p e2e crypto required for actual security. Even if the entire ISO IETF IEEE EFF CCC stood and said "this new tower encryption is solid"... How soon people forget... The corrupt telcos gave everyone's ass away to govcorp, without even a corrupt fisa calea or criminal/civil warrant, many took a nice fee schedule for all that too. And the nsa and every other country just taps and dumps the unencrypted telco nodes / backhauls... into their own utah's. And telco employees get paid and moled out for hookers and blow. And 5G (4/3/2 too) is such fucked up spec and implementation they'll be press release self partying about their fake fixing of all the other intentional ecosystem firmware and signaling backdoors and bugs for the next 50 years. Not to mention telcos just swiss cheese privacy policy and NDA commercial contract your ass away like every other bigcorp RingFaceBoogleLexaDMV... Bypass that... Get a PSK, or voice confirmed TOFU, or use the software out there to do the key exchange over SMS... with all your call contacts. Plug that into phone app that sits on the audio bus or uses cell data IP, and ratchets out per session keys. With 4G and 5G making cell data reasonably cheap, and a somewhat more secure phone below, or better tethered to wifi hotspot or just plain wifi, things begin to become potentially usable for some everyday non critical use in 'smaller/cheaper/mobile than laptop' form factor. Thousands of people already do this. > A few years ago, I read that a disused, old cell phone (with no active > subscription) would activate in the presence of one of these Stingray > devices. Stingray is MITM. GSM a5 encryption long since hacked. A recent hack documented phone exploitability over baseband SMS. Baseband is untrustable adversary CPU, if the phones block design leaves baseband powered up to battery even if asleep, and if such baseband has access to the phones hardware control bus (main cpu power bus, etc)... turning on an "off" phone is certainly possible. You'd have to see if there's any news exploits of that being done. Or just probe around your phone pinouts and see what blocks are eating all the microamps when it's "off". Librem and Pinephone supposedly do some data bus isolation (serial) of baseband from the main CPU/RAM, instead of lame IOMMU or direct shared access, but you'd have to check about their power bus. Librem is a bit more chunky so it would be easier to verify. Unlike librem, pinephone switches are still internal, so you have to disassemble it, or wire in external extensions, to use them in real life. > But if the power consumption of such a phone could be > monitored continuously, that might implement a cheap, easy "Stingray > detector". Every tower base has an id, there are phone apps that read and track the power by id and notify on anomaly. Obviously such id's are spoofable and cooperateable. You can do a lot more with SDR, OpenBTS, be your own stingray. Beyond that is characterizing, discriminating, locating RF itself, much more time and $$$.

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