August 2020 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Cryptoanarchism writecode vs SJW style methods [re: mentions child gangs slave in source]
by grarpamp 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

> https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10458 > https://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=16559200&cid=60174924 > https://developers.slashdot.org/story/20/06/12/0543254/openzfs-removed-offe… Most opensource project issue trackers now experiencing same. Master/slave? Some internet forums are, discussing that surely tickets must now too be filed across all OSS projects demanding removal some of the newly approved words (and even more old ones not yet found analysed and latched on by triggersphere) such as 'dependant', 'dependency', 'child', etc for being say extremely debilitating triggers regarding many peoples and nations former status and horrible experiences while as such or under such authoritarian forces, and are noting oddity why SJWs are not filing those tickets too, opening possible reality their raging being symptom apparent that maybe need therapy, some love puddles, attention at their time to address some self issues on those words... or not. What is the word graph there among the various camps. As they saying, who knows. But does seem they forgot to destroy some devices in their PC's first to set proper example. Now they know and can stage protest showcasing their action therein to youtube. And must destroy whole PC too because the firmware, CPU, manufacturers are all littered with such words... their entire machine is one big trigger baked in silicon ;) https://duckduckgo.com/?iax=images&ia=images&q=hard+drive+master+slave+jump… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o25I2fzFGoY Carlin on the matter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1FxfR3lg6Q Simpsons pressure to signal Of far more important matter to this forum... Remember, authoritarians also deploying some of the same SJW style methods to condition you susceptible so that you will remove strong crypto, decentralization, privacy, p2p, anonymity, cryptocurrency, distributed voluntary cooperation, etc... the very cypherpunk cryptoanarchism... from your code. Be aware of that, don't fall susceptible, continue writing the cypherpunk code of cryptoanarchism. May it yield a more free peaceful forceless loving world. " I strongly suspect the people who are pushing for these things fall into two camps. The first camp are people who genuinely want to control the language, and by proxy, thought. These are very dangerous people and should be resisted at all times. The second camp are people who genuinely want to do something so they can be a part of this current trend and feel like they are participating in a meaningful way. These are ordinary decent people, but are certainly influenced by the bluster and actions of the first camp. Here's the thing, though. If you're in the second camp, your actions will not save you from the first camp. The authoritarians in the first camp are fundamentally about control, and if you stand in their way, your past actions will mean nothing. Anything less than complete subservience to whatever ideology is currently in vogue in the first camp, is treated as a viral attack and is stamped out with extreme prejudice. Your past capitulation will not serve you in the future. Nobody--at least nobody with a lick of sense or proportion--actually thinks that changing "master/slave" to something else will accomplish anything of substance or real value. It's nothing more than a publicity stunt to demonstrate that you are not like those people over there, the racists. It's a signal of your adherence to the new narrative, nothing more. The authoritarians in the first camp will acknowledge your signal, and they now know that later you will be more likely to accept the next click on the ratchet. Make no mistake, however; when they ratchet it too far for you, nothing you did in the past will save you. It's the behavior of cults, and used to great effect at controlling behavior. What's surprising is how many tech people are susceptible to it. "

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Collin
by rooty 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YFn3NtG4bJ8

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Great Firewalls: Watching Blocking Censoring Disappearing You with Loving Oppression
by grarpamp 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/Dae-cukKMqfzmTT4Ksh1Bzlx7ws/ Present in and coming to your own countries soon... Re: [TLS] Possible blocking of Encrypted SNI extension in China David Fifield <david(a)bamsoftware.com> Fri, 07 August 2020 23:56 UTC On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 03:45:48PM +0000, onoketa wrote: > The Great Firewall of China may have identified and blocked > Cloudflare's ESNI implementation. > > I have found that when using a TLS client hello with ESNI extension to > connect to servers behind Cloudflare's CDN, the connection will be cut > off after the whole TLS handshake is done. And then that IP address > will be blocked at the TCP level for several minutes. There is now a detailed written report on the new phenomenon of ESNI blocking in China. It was produced by a collaboration of researchers from Geneva (https://censorship.ai/) GFW Report (https://gfw.report/) and iYouPort (https://www.iyouport.org/) https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/posts/china-censors-esni/esni/ (English) https://geneva.cs.umd.edu/zh/posts/china-censors-esni/esni/ (Chinese) Here are some of the points most likely to be of interest to this group: * The detector is not merely matching on the lack of plaintext SNI; it is specifically looking for the ESNI extension 0xffce. * The ESNI detector only matches the ESNI encrypted_server_name extension 0xffce (draft-ietf-tls-esni-00 through -06), not the ECH extensions encrypted_client_hello 0xff02, ech_nonce 0xff03, outer_extension 0xff04 (draft-ietf-tls-esni-07). * The encrypted_server_name extension has to be syntactically correct; the detector is not just looking for the byte patter ff cc. * Once an ESNI-containing ClientHello is detected, the firewall drops packets in the client→server direction for 120 or 180 seconds. * The detector runs on all TCP ports, not just 443. This short payload is sufficient to trigger blocking: 160303003b0100003703035b72616e646f6d72616e646f6d72616e646f6d7261 6e646f6d72616e646f6d5d0000000100000effce000a53754772000000000000 Python code to generate this payload is appended to this message. Most of the functions of the Great Firewall work bidirectionally, and the ESNI detection and blocking are no exception. Sending an ESNI-containing ClientHello from *outside* of China to a server *inside* results in temporary blocking, just the same as sending one from the inside to the outside. This makes it easy to experiment with, even if you don't control a host in China. To experience ESNI blocking for yourself, choose a responsive TCP port in China (doesn't have to be port 443), for example www.tsinghua.edu.cn:80. Begin a TCP ping to the port, for example using one of these commands: hping3 -S www.tsinghua.edu.cn -p 80 nping -4 -c 0 --tcp-connect www.tsinghua.edu.cn -p 80 Then send the trigger payload: printf '\x16\x03\x03\x00\x3b\x01\x00\x00\x37\x03\x03[randomrandomrandomrandomrandom]\x00\x00\x00\x01\x00\x00\x0e\xff\xce\x00\nSuGr\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00' | nc -4 -v www.tsinghua.edu.cn 80 The TCP pings will stop receiving replies for 120 or 180 seconds, then will start back up again. ---- #!/usr/bin/env python3 # Generates a small TLS ClientHello that trigger's the GFW's ESNI detector. # Writes output to the file minimal.bin. import struct from scapy.all import * load_layer("tls") from scapy.layers.tls.all import * # https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc8446#section-3.4 def var(ceiling, data): if ceiling < 256: fmt = ">B" elif ceiling < 65536: fmt = ">H" else: raise ValueError(ceiling) return struct.pack(fmt, len(data)) + data # https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-tls-esni-01#section-5 def encrypted_server_name(suite, group, key_exchange, record_digest, encrypted_sni): return struct.pack(">HH", suite, group) \ + var(65535, key_exchange) \ + var(65535, record_digest) \ + var(65535, encrypted_sni) clienthello = TLS( msg = TLSClientHello( gmt_unix_time = 0x5b72616e, # "[ran" random_bytes = b"domrandomrandomrandomrandom]", ciphers = [], ext = [ # The GFW detector requires a syntactically valid # server_name_extension, but the actual values it contains may be # nonsense. Here we use a CipherSuite of 0x5375 ("Su"), a NamedGroup # of 0x4772 ("Gr"), and zero-length key_exchange, record_digest, and # encrypted_sni. TLS_Ext_Unknown(type=0xffce, val=encrypted_server_name(0x5375, 0x4772, b"", b"", b"")), ], ) ) TLS(bytes(clienthello)).show() print(bytes(clienthello)) FILENAME = "minimal.bin" open(FILENAME, "wb").write(bytes(clienthello)) print("output written to {}".format(FILENAME))

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"Why I’m Writing A Book On Cryptography"
by coderman 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

https://www.cryptologie.net/article/504/ Why I’m Writing A Book On Cryptography posted last month I’ve now been writing a book on applied cryptography for a year and a half. I’m nearing the end of my journey, as I have one last ambitious chapter left to write: next-generation cryptography (a chapter that I’ll use to talk about cryptography that will become more and more practical: post-quantum cryptography, homomorphic encryption, multi-party computation, and zk-SNARKs). I’ve been asked multiple times why write a new book about cryptography? and why should I read your book?. To answer this, you have to understand when it all started… Diagrams are everything Today if you want to learn about almost anything, you just google it. Yet, for cryptography, and depending on what you're looking for, resources can be quite lacking. It all started a long time ago. For a class, I had to implement a [differential power analysis attack](https://www.paulkocher.com/doc/DifferentialPowerAnalysis.pdf), a breakthrough in cryptanalysis as it was the first side-channel attack to be published. A differential power analysis uses the power consumption of a device during an encryption to leak its private key. At the time, I realized that great papers could convey great ideas with very little emphasis on understanding. I remember banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what the author of the white paper was trying to say. Worse, I couldn’t find a good resource that explained the paper. So I banged my head a bit more, and finally I got it. And then I thought I would help others. So I drew some diagrams, animated them, and recorded myself going over them. That was [my first screencast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbqNCgVcXsM). This first step in education was enough to make me want to do more. I started making more of these videos, and started writing more articles about cryptography on this blog (today totaling more than 500 articles). [we want to know] I realized early that diagrams were extremely helpful to understand complicated concepts, and that strangely most resources in the field shied away from them. For example, anyone in cryptography who thinks about AES-CBC would immediately think about the following wikipedia diagram: [aes cbc] So here I was, trying to explain everything I learned, and thinking hard about what sorts of simple diagrams could easily convey these complex ideas. That’s when I started thinking about a book, years and years before [Manning Publications](https://manning.com) would reach out to me with a book deal. The applied cryptographer curriculum  I hadn’t started cryptography due to a long-life passion. I had finished a bachelor in theoretical mathematics and didn’t know what was next for me. I had also been programming my whole life, and I wanted to reconcile the two. Naturally, I got curious about cryptography, which seemed to have the best of both world, and started reading the different books at my disposal. I quickly discovered my life's calling. Some things were annoying me though. In particular, the long introductions that would start with history. I was only interested in the technicalities, and always had been. I swore to myself, if I ever wrote a book about cryptography, I would not write a single line on Vigenère ciphers, Caesar ciphers, and others. And so after applying to the masters of Cryptography at the university of Bordeaux, and obtaining a degree in the subject, I thought I was ready for the world. Little did I know. What I thought was a very applied degree actually lacked a lot on the real world protocols I was about to attack. I had spent a lot of time learning about the mathematics of elliptic curves, but nothing about how they were used in cryptographic algorithms. I had learned about LFSRs, and ElGamal, and DES, and a series of other cryptographic primitives that I would never see again. When I started working in the industry at Matasano, which then became NCC Group, my first gig was to audit [OpenSSL](https://www.openssl.org/) (the most popular TLS implementation). Oh boy, did it hurt my brain. I remember coming back home every day with a strong headache. What a clusterfuck of a library. I had no idea at the time that I would years later become a co-author of TLS 1.3. [sign] But at that point I was already thinking: this is what I should have learned in school. The knowledge I’m getting now is what would have been useful to prepare me for the real world. After all, I was now a security practitioner specialized in cryptography. I was reviewing real-world cryptographic applications. I was doing the job that one would wish they had after finishing a cryptography degree. I implemented, verified, used, and advised on what cryptographic algorithms to use. This is the reason I’m the first reader of the book I’m writing. This is what I would have written to my past self in order to prepare me for the real world. The use of cryptography is where most of the bugs are My consulting job led me to audit many real world cryptographic applications like the [OpenSSL](https://www.nccgroup.com/us/about-us/newsroom-and-events/blog/2015…, the [encrypted backup system of Google](https://www.nccgroup.trust/globalassets/our-research/us/public-reports/2018/final_public_report_ncc_group_google_encryptedbackup_2018-10-10_v1.0.pdf), the [TLS 1.3 implementation of Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/ncc-groups-cryptography-services-au…, the [certificate authority protocol of Let’s Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/2015/04/14/ncc-group-audit.html), the [sapling protocol of Zcash](https://www.nccgroup.com/us/our-research/zcash-overwinter-consensus-…, the [threshold proxy re-encryption scheme of NuCypher](https://blog.nucypher.com/security-audits--round-1--3/) and dozens and dozens of other real-world cryptographic applications that I unfortunately cannot mention publicly. Early in my job, I was tasked to audit the custom protocol a big corporation (that I can’t name) had written to encrypt their communications. It turns out that, they were signing everything but the ephemeral keys, which completely broke the whole protocol (as one could have easily replaced the ephemeral keys). A rookie mistake from anyone with some experience with secure transport protocols, but something that was missed by people who thought they were experienced enough to roll their own crypto. I remember explaining the vulnerability at the end of the engagement, and a room full of engineers turning silent for a good 30 seconds. This story repeated itself many times during my career. There was this time where while auditing a cryptocurrency for another client, I found a way to forge transactions from already existing ones (due to some ambiguity of what was being signed). Looking at TLS implementations for another client, I found some subtle ways to break an RSA implementation, which in turned transformed into a white paper (with one of the inventor of RSA) leading to a number of [Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) reported to a dozen of open source projects](https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1173). More recently, reading about Matrix as part of writing my book, I realized that their authentication protocol was completely broken, [leading to a complete break of their end-to-end encryption](https://matrix.org/security-disclosure-policy/). [comic] There’s so many details that can unfortunately collapse under you, when making use of cryptography. At that point, I knew I had to write something about it. This is why my book contains many of these anecdotes. As part of the job, I would review cryptography libraries and applications in a multitude of programming languages. I discovered bugs (for example [CVE-2016-3959](https://cryptologie.net/article/347/my-first-cve-o/?utm_cont… in Golang’s standard library), I researched ways that libraries could fool you into misusing them (for example see my paper [How to Backdoor Diffie-Hellman](https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/644)) and I advised on what libraries to use. Developers never knew what library to use, and I always found the answer to be tricky. I went on to invent the [disco protocol](https://discocrypto.com), and wrote a fully-featured cryptographic library in less than 1,000 lines of code in several languages. Disco only relied on two cryptographic primitives: the permutation of SHA-3 and curve25519. Yes, from only these two things in 1,000 lines of code a developer could do any type of authenticated key exchange, signatures, encryption, MACs, hashing, key derivation, etc. This gave me a unique perspective as to what a good cryptographic library was supposed to be. I wanted my book to contain these kind of practical insights. So naturally, the different chapters contain examples on how to do crypto in different programming languages, using well-respected cryptographic libraries. A need for a new book? As I was giving [one of my annual cryptography training at Black Hat](https://www.blackhat.com/us-17/training/beyond-the-beast-a-broad-surve…, one student came to me and asked if I could recommend a good book or online course on cryptography. I remember advising the student to read [the book from Boneh & Shoup](http://toc.cryptobook.us/) and [Cryptography I from Boneh on Coursera](https://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/courses/OnlineCrypto/). The student told me “Ah, I tried, it’s too theoretical!”. This answer stayed with me. I disagreed at first, but slowly realized that they were right. Most of these resources were pretty heavy in math, and most developers interacting with cryptography don’t want to deal with math.  What else was there for them? The other two somewhat respected resources at the time were Applied Cryptography and Cryptography Engineering (both from Schneier). But these books were starting to be quite outdated. Applied Cryptography spent 4 chapters on block ciphers, with a whole chapter on cipher modes of operation but none on authenticated encryption. Cryptography Engineering had a single mention of elliptic curve cryptography (in a footnote). On the other hand, many of my videos or blog posts were becoming good primary references for some cryptographic concepts. I knew I could do something special. Gradually, many of my students started becoming interested in cryptocurrencies, asking more and more questions on the subject. At the same time, I started to audit more and more cryptocurrency applications. I finally moved to a job at Facebook to work on [Libra](https://libra.org/). Cryptocurrency was now one of the hottest field to work on, mixing a multitude of extremely interesting cryptographic primitives that so far had seen no real-world use case (zero knowledge proofs, aggregated signatures, threshold cryptography, multi-party computations, consensus protocols, cryptographic accumulators, verifiable random functions, verifiable delay functions, ... the list goes on) I was now in a unique position. I knew I could write something that would tell students, developers, consultants, security engineers, and others, what modern applied cryptography was all about. [book] This was going to be a book with very little formulas, but filled with many diagrams. This was going to be a book with little history, but filled with modern stories about cryptographic failures that I had witnessed for real. This was going to be a book with little about legacy algorithms, but filled with cryptography that I've personally seen being used at scale: TLS, the Noise protocol framework, Wireguard, the Signal protocol, cryptocurrencies, HSMs, threshold cryptography, and so on. This was going to be a book with little theoretical cryptography, but filled with what could become relevant: password-authentication key exchanges, zero-knowledge proofs, post-quantum cryptography, and so on. Real-World Cryptography When [Manning Publications](https://manning.com) reached out to me in 2018, asking if I wanted to write a book on cryptography for them, I already knew the answer. I already knew what I wanted to write about. I had just been waiting for someone to give me the opportunity, the excuse to spend my time writting the book I had in mind. Coincidentally, they had a series of "real-world" book, and so naturally I suggested that my book extend it. [book] Real-World Cryptography is [available for free in early-access](https://www.manning.com/books/real-world-cryptography?a_aid=R…. I want this to be the best book on applied cryptography. For this reason, if you have any feedback to give, please send it my way :) The book should be ready in print for the end of the year.

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Julian Assange: A Wanted Man - ARTE Reportage - Watch the full documentary | ARTE
by jim bell 10 Aug '20

10 Aug '20

https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/089631-000-A/julian-assange-a-wanted-man/

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Blockchain Empowers Social Resistance and Terrorism Through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
by jim bell 09 Aug '20

09 Aug '20

https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1743&context=jss [PARTIAL QUOTE FOLLOWS] Journal of Strategic SecurityVolume 13 Number 1 Article 3 Blockchain Empowers Social Resistance and Terrorism Through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Armin KrishnanEast Carolina University, krishnana(a)ecu.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jsspp. 41-58 Recommended CitationKrishnan, Armin. "Blockchain Empowers Social Resistance and TerrorismThrough Decentralized Autonomous Organizations." Journal of StrategicSecurity 13, no. 1 (2020) : 41-58.DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.13.1.1743Available at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol13/iss1/3 -------------------- "A new decentralized Silk Road for illicit goods and content could appear atany time that uses smart contracts to manage orders, to accept and releasepayments, and to deduct a founders’ fee, without the need of the operatorsto leave behind many digital fingerprints, if any at all. It might beimpossible to shut down a blockchain-based Silk Road, especially if itsnodes were numerous and spread across multiple jurisdictions.48Obviously, blockchain and smart contracts would also lend themselves tothe use for blackmail and for dead hand switches that automaticallyrelease content based on pre-programmed conditions. For example, if acertain transaction on the blockchain has not taken place at a specificpoint of time, it can trigger the smart contract function, which executes aprogram. "One can also imagine the use of a DAO to facilitate an anonymousassassination market, which is a concept originally proposed by anarchistJim Bell in his 1994 essay “Assassination Politics.” Bell wrote, “While it'scomparatively easy to “get away with murder,” it’s a lot harder to rewardthe person who does it, and that person is definitely taking a serious risk.’49 His solution is an anonymous assassination market, where individualscan anonymously contribute funds for the assassination of a celebrity to alegal organization and whoever guesses the correct death date of thecelebrity receives all the money donated. A high enough fee for making abet would discourage contributors from making random guesses. As thecontributions increase, so would the incentives for somebody to kill theunpopular celebrity and collect the money. "In the blockchain age a smart contract can govern such an arrangement.The assassin could be confident that the sponsoring organization willmake the payment for a correct bet and would be able to collect the moneyin an anonymous fashion. An anonymous vote by all contributors couldestablish whether the celebrity has died and could automatically releaseaccumulated funds to the correct guesser. "According to a report by Vice,people already use the prediction platform Augur to make bets on “thedeaths of public figures, including Betty White, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos,and Warren Buffett.”50 The practical advantage of an assassination marketfor those participating is that it creates legal challenges as to whetherJournal of Strategic Security, Vol. 13, No. 1https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jss/vol13/iss1/3DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.13.1.174351making a bet constitutes the incitement of murder and also who could becharged with it in case of a large number of people contributing money tothe cause of compensating somebody who makes a correct prediction. Blockchain-Enabled Political Revolutions "During the Arab Spring small groups of activists could mobilize the massesagainst the respective government through tweets, Facebook posts, andtext messaging. The Egyptian government became so desperate at onepoint that they temporarily shut down the Internet and mobile servicesnation-wide on January 28, 2011 to prevent the coordination ofanticipated mass protests.51 After the Arab Spring, many authoritariangovernments cracked down on social media and NGOs. Major social mediaplatforms and search engines, most importantly Facebook, Twitter, andGoogle now face strong political demands to police content under thethreat of onerous regulation and fines. Peter Singer and EmersonBrooking have pointed out that the social media companies have assumedthe functions of government and that “they are now grappled withintractable political problems,” adding that the problems are of “the kind[that are] always destined to leave a portion of its constituentsdispleased.”52 [end of partial quote]

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Inverse: The big future of satellite internet just took a promising step forward
by jim bell 09 Aug '20

09 Aug '20

Inverse: The big future of satellite internet just took a promising step forward. https://www.inverse.com/innovation/satellite-internet-transceiver

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how a federal contractor secretly puts government tracking software into hundreds of mobile apps.
by jim bell 09 Aug '20

09 Aug '20

https://www.androidauthority.com/government-tracking-apps-1145989/ * A new report exposes how a federal contractor secretly puts government tracking software into hundreds of mobile apps. * The data gleaned from this tracking is then sold back to the US government for undisclosed purposes. * This tactic is deceptive because the tracking isn’t disclosed. However, it appears to be totally legal. new report today from The Wall Street Journal exposes yet another concerning development when it comes to mobile phone tracking. According to the report, at least one federal contractor puts government tracking software in over 500 mobile applications. The contractor — a Virginia-based company called Anomaly Six LLC — pays mobile developers to include its in-house tracking code within their apps. The trackers then collect anonymized data from our phones and Anomaly Six aggregates that data and sells it to the US government. It sounds crazy, but it’s happening. What’s more, it appears it’s totally legal. Government tracking: What you need to know The report from The Wall Street Journal makes it clear that the tracking software from Anomaly Six appears in over 500 mobile applications. However, Anomaly Six would not disclose the apps with which it has partnerships. The WSJ was unable to glean this information through other methods. One would assume you could dive into the terms of service agreements of popular apps and find references to Anomaly Six. That would be a waste of time, though, because app developers don’t need to disclose the Anomaly Six tracker to users. Therefore, you could have one or even dozens of apps with Anomaly Six’s government tracking code and you would have no idea. [end of partial quote]

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Inverse: The big future of satellite internet just took a promising step forward
by jim bell 09 Aug '20

09 Aug '20

Inverse: The big future of satellite internet just took a promising step forward. https://www.inverse.com/innovation/satellite-internet-transceiver

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Israel's "Middle East, secured!" campaign continues - [PEACE]
by Zig the N.g 09 Aug '20

09 Aug '20

Our collective condolences to the (yet to be assessed) hundreds of Lebanese who have recently lost their lives. 'It's Like Hiroshima': Terrifying Seismic Shock From Blast Devastates Beirut https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-nuke-just-go-beirut-terrifying-m… ... Lebanese Prime Minister says Beirut explosions caused by an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years in a warehouse <BE WARNED: The following is a RANT, speculation, possibly entirely hypothetical postulations of an intense, sad and altogether unfortunate situation> There is something remarkably short sighted about the Israelis - they seem to imagine that the following are simultaneously true: 1) That Americans will believe that "securing the Lebanese-Israeli border" is the USA's #1 national priority. 2) That creating such "friendly" relations with __Israel's immediate geographical neighbours__, is somehow a good thing. Go figure, muh j.gger wh.iggers… And a message to the Lebanese: it seems you may have missed the memo that EVERYBODY needs to clean up their back yard. As in "Are you firetrucking serious, you _really_ left 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years in a warehouse" ???!!?! Speaking about off your nut, I guess you decided that leaving such low hanging fruit around was too much effort to do anything about? A note to the entire fricken world, since everybody seems to have missed the memo: CLEAN UP YOUR BACK YARD ALREADY!! (2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, in ONE warehouse, in downtown $MAJOR_CITY?? Please! This is nothing but negligence of the first order!) and before you can even say "boo", Trump is running round like an Israeli parliamentarian on crack desperately trying to implicate America in "securing the Israeli-Lebanese relationship": Trump Calls Beirut Explosion "A Terrible Attack - A Bomb Of Some Kind" After Briefed By Generals https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-says-beirut-explosion-attack-b… .. Trump says military experts tell him Beirut blast a 'bomb of some kind'. .. Trump said he had been briefed by “our great generals” and that they “seem to feel” that the explosion was not an accident. .. "It was a bomb of some kind, yes" — he emphasized when questioned on it. How can such statements of "feeling" be useful on almost any view? Sometimes Trump ought consider that when he speaks WITH HIS GENERALS, perhaps he should ACTUALLY ASK THEM what they think might be worth communicating to the public, BEFORE communicating with the public. If he really believes that they are "great generals", surely he should seek their advice a little more? One imagines that the generals may finally have had a wake up call that Trump tends to tweet out the other ear, what comes in the one ear... better late than never I guess (that the generals realise Trump's nature). At least both Isreal and Hesbollah seem to be both in agreement _and_ in totally unequivocal denial that this was any sort of "security related incident": Israeli military sources tell Israeli 10 News reporter: Israel didn't bomb Beirut. The explosion did not occur in a Hezbollah weapons depot. This was not a security-related event. https://t.co/hgDXFVxZdH — Elizabeth Tsurkov (@Elizrael) August 4, 2020 There is certainly no doubt that a few thousand tons of "ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years" may well have experienced degredation in the storage and or electrical cables in the warehouse - on this planet we have these things called rats, and mice, and other critters which sometimes gnaw through electrical cables (and data cables, and some cables which carry both power and data) and cause problems, also vessels (especially metal, but also plastic) can have problems too (sufficiently hungry rats do gnaw right through plastic if they think there's a chance of food on the other side of that plastic). Also, a piece of degraded metal which falls, may strike other metal and cause a spark.

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