September 2020 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

J. Random Universe
by Robert Hettinga 08 Sep '20

08 Sep '20

J. Random Universe Geodesic Culture Robert A. Hettinga (rah(a)rah.ai) Seafeathers Bay, Anguilla September 5, 2020, 2:37PM AST I suppose the following may read like a bunch of gobbledegook to most people, but I suppose I can’t really care. It makes sense to me at the moment. Though I need a nap, now. A frequent trope of the cypherpunk list in the middle 1990’s was the character J. Random Cypherpunk. The name is self-explanatory, but he had just as much cred there as a social/political variable as the cryptographic variables Alice, Bob, Carol, or Dave. Mrs. RAH and I had a cat named Alice and still have a dog named Dave. Heh. Never got around to using Randy before Mrs. RAH took away my nomenclature card, but we did get to Eve, Mallory, Rusty (Trusty, Trusted Entity, whatever, Trent was just too foppish, didn’t lend itself to a dog’s call name), all of whom are gone, now. Animals after them had sensible names, like Red, an aging black-mouthed bob-tailed red “heeler” who likes to sleep on my right foot like he owns it, particularly around suppertime. Somehow this afternoon I’m thinking about the universe, the simulation thereof, the multiverse, and anthropism, and out pops J. Random Universe. It’s all about randomness. It’s now obvious to me that you can’t study infinity without randomness. Any first semester calculus student knows that. I must have smoked a number on the way to class that day. Epsilons and deltas were boring, and it turns out that they were just tacked onto calculus after the fact to keep it nailed down so it didn’t blow away. Nonetheless, I argue this with the same lumpen-enthusiasm that I argue about the recent ‘discovery’ of mine that has been obvious to anyone else, like, say, my recent breathtaking intuition, after four of five decades of acquaintance with it, that Hegelianism is pure and simple moral relativism. In the same Hegelian vein, I suppose it’s safe to say that since history is the application of a human narrative to previous events, it is an art, and not a science to begin with. Another thing that everybody figured out long before I did, and completely agrees to Popper’s proof that Marxism is pseudoscience. You always know the end of a story before you can write it, or at least re-write it into actual coherence. Post hoc, etc. I have a friend who’s a priest, more fun, a converted Mormon, who has said at least once in public that I’m going to end up a ‘towel-boy in purgatory’ because of my backslid-from-Unitarian-but-declared-anyway metaphysical naturalism. Since we’re talking about stuff that sends the average scientific, or at least mathematical, dogmatic atheist scurrying to the confessional, this should be entertaining. Right. Cosmology. Sorry. This is going to be one of those things for which a preamble is not really necessary. I needed to pad things out a bit. Everybody knows by now that a single universe cannot contain all the unlikelihood that life exists in this one, much less intelligence, for various values thereof. Gelertner, Berlinsky, and Meyer are all over this like a duck on a junebug. Heard it on a Hoover podcast with Peter Robinson last year. They point and laugh at a multiverse, especially the idea that some anthropic principal dictates it. I don’t agree. Not the first time I don’t agree with geniuses, I guess. It seems to me that anthropism in a multiverse is quite handy. If, like calculus, it hasn’t found it’s epsilons and deltas just yet, relying on infinity as a ‘no matter where you go, there you are’ in answer to ‘why are we here’, is as good a hack as any. Which brings me to the idea of a universal simulation. Without following the turtles *all* the way down, I’d like to propose a cypherpunk’s solution. The universe is discovered, not calculated. God does, it seems, play dice, to the extent that a literary character, um, plays. Not only is the universe unknowable by sheer dint of processing power, any arbitrary community of humans, much less a single one, cannot process enough information to calculate the entire universe in the Newtonian sense, or the Misian sense, for that matter. Nor can any machine or arbitrary community of machines do that. ‘Community’ is fraught here, machine-wise, because it implies all kinds of things like emotion, the simulation of same, dominance hierarchies of emoting beings versus geodesics of processors, and all kinds of off the wall whoop-de-do, *gasping for air...* but also, the universe, at the quantum level is *random*. Incalculable, all the way up, all the way down. You can’t fool me Lord Russell. If you were to simulate this universe, you would need to simulate randomness. At this point cypherpunks are waving their arms, semaphore, at the back of the room, while real cryptographers smirk in the front row. Pseudorandomness requires a seed. A key. And if you have a key, you can now *predict* the results of the simulation without having to run it to begin with. Heh. Obviously this is wrong, full of amphiboly. But I’m too lazy to think about it now because it’s time for a nap. Cheers, RAH

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Fox News: National security surveillance court finds FBI regularly does not follow rules
by jim bell 08 Sep '20

08 Sep '20

Fox News: National security surveillance court finds FBI regularly does not follow rules. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/national-security-surveillance-court-finds…

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Censorship: Thunderf00t Phil Mason Beloved Worldwide Gets Banned
by grarpamp 08 Sep '20

08 Sep '20

His day job is as a scientist in the field of chemistry and biochemistry at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. His tongue in cheek, yet starkly accurate criticisms, have earned him over 950,000 subscribers on YouTube and an aggregate total of more than 220 million views. https://mobile.twitter.com/thunderf00t http://www.youtube.com/user/Thunderf00t/videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z1KgNqsN3s Thunderf00t - YouTube Just Hit Me AGAIN!... proof https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rqw4krMOug Thunderf00t - The Internet: Where Religions Come To Die... censored https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j95HpNz_Blw Thunderf00t - Dawafilms: Islam must destroy human rights... censored https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EH1Mhp_ANvI Thunderf00t - Feminazi SJW's... censored https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cebsoBbXpv8 Thunderfoot - YouTube vs Free Speech... proof https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/youtube-removing-videos-well-liked-che… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Mason https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz7607 FUCK SILICON VALLEY SOCIAL MEDIA BIAS ENFORCERS. " "Meanwhile the doctor makes these claims in a gazillion videos," Mason says, "and his videos are still up". Mason explains his other videos have been taken down for debunking "idiots who don't know anything about science". "What are you boys on?" he asks YouTube. Regardless of your thoughts on whether or not Mason is on the right side of the arguments he is making, one can't ignore what appears to be a growing, asymmetric, strong arm of censorship that continues to protrude from the country's top tech titans. Heading into the election, we have already seen Twitter censor the President, Facebook mull the ideas of pulling down news articles and now, once again, YouTube selecting which global experts are allowed to have a say in matters of current events. Orwell would be proud. "

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Croatia Week: Quantum physicists in Zagreb help discover network impossible to spy on
by jim bell 08 Sep '20

08 Sep '20

Croatia Week: Quantum physicists in Zagreb help discover network impossible to spy on. https://www.croatiaweek.com/quantum-physicists-in-zagreb-help-discover-netw…

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Re: Phys.org: Revolutionary quantum breakthrough paves way for safer online communication
by John Young 07 Sep '20

07 Sep '20

Yes, privacy is a lure for siphoning user data. An ancient artifice like deity for raising funds for temples. Aka national security. Or cryptography. Or cities. Or peoples. Or individuals. Or freedom. Or language. Or communcation. At 02:09 PM 9/6/2020, \\0xDynamite wrote: >You know, maybe all of this encryption/privacy/security concern is >outmoded. Maybe we're barking up the wrong tree here. Perhaps we >should just create a happy community of people who know what the fuck >they're doing. Why have privacy when you can make a community of >trusted people? , and wait for everyone else to get their head out of >their ass. Eventually it gets as big as the human population. > >Privacy might just be the wrong direction with trusted peers and >keeping out the javascripters. > >\0xD

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the coming coup attempt, possibility, in the USA, 20 Jan 2021 - [PEACE] [AND] [MILITARY COUPS]
by Zenaan Harkness 07 Sep '20

07 Sep '20

Interesting times: The Coming Coup Michael Anton via The American Mind https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/ https://www.zerohedge.com/political/coming-coup ... These items are, to repeat, merely a short but representative list of what Byron York recently labeled “coup porn.” York seems to think this is just harmless fantasizing on the part of the ruling class and its Democratic servants. For some of them, no doubt that’s true. But for all of them? I’m not so sure. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/coup-porn-resistance-… In his famously exhaustive discussion of conspiracies, Machiavelli goes out of his way to emphasize the indispensability of “operational security”—i.e., silence—to success. The first rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy. The second rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy. So why are the Democrats—publicly—talking about the conspiracy? Because they know that, for it to succeed, it must not look like a conspiracy. They need to plant the idea in the public mind, now, that their unlawful and illegitimate removal of President Trump from office will somehow be his fault. Never mind the pesky detail that the president would refuse to leave only if he were convinced he legitimately won. Remember: Biden should not concede --under any circumstances--. The second part of the plan is either to produce enough harvested ballots—lawfully or not—to tip close states, or else dispute the results in close states and insist, no matter what the tally says, that Biden won them. The worst-case scenario (for the country, but not for the ruling class) would be results in a handful of states that are so ambiguous and hotly disputed that no one can rightly say who won. Of course, that will not stop the Democrats from insisting that they won. ... Pray. And vote. Vote and pray. And pray some more. And consider testing the voting system, whilst remembering to pray. Did someone mention vote? And pray? If not, vote and pray. Pray for our collective, and individual, redemption. Pray that righteousness prevails. Pray that evil is cast from this world, into prisons and beyond. God speed.

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Cryptocurrency: Monetary Fundamentals with Jeffrey Tucker
by grarpamp 07 Sep '20

07 Sep '20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KKiTd-3uNI Monetary Fundamentals Jeffrey Tucker “The highest hopes we have [for humanity] is a currency that is separated from the state. It is possibly the most important tool we have in the struggle for human rights.” -- Jeffrey Tucker Do not assume the "original" or "bitcoin" or "firsts" or any other coin extant today will be among set of extant coins tomorrow.

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Peak 2020 - Performance of the year, Oscar fer sure - Truck gets diesel - NotTheBee.com - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 07 Sep '20

07 Sep '20

What do you get when you cross a brand new 475hp 1,050 lb-ft torque Ford Super Duty F-250 driven by a senior citizen, with a line of ANTIFA-fist raising "patriarchy protesters"? You get something worthy of the Anthems of 2020 documentary :) NotTheBee.com is a spin off of BabylonBee.com, but whereas BabylonBee is satire, NotTheBee is true actual news. Enjoy, No matter how many times I watch this video I still can't believe it's not satire https://notthebee.com/article/no-matter-how-many-times-i-watch-this-video-i… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umfSM-mOdQg ...

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Shameless pro-USA political clout and essential propaganda - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 06 Sep '20

06 Sep '20

This one's really sweet, cute in fact - I promise I'll go straight to bed and have a nap after this, but really, how cute is this true storys - firstly I'll just lightly paraphrase it for y'all: <paraphrase> Our American intelligence traps are the best! In fact, our bear traps are just the greatest - with our $104 million dollar B-52B StratoFortress cavorting the Black Sea, we got EIGHT Russian fighter jets sidling up and EXPOSING their radar signatures. Did I mention our intelligence traps are the best? No one does intelligence traps like us! We showed those Russians! We have B-52 StratoFortresses, and they great - they are just so good! They have "Fortress" in the name. They are strong. They are like a fortress in the sky! Our StratoFortresses are the BEST StratoFortresses in the world! And we literally ATE up the Russian radar signatures! We are awesome, and our intelligence traps are the best intelligence traps ever! </paraphrase> True story muffas, enjoy: The Pentagon Has 'Staged' Black Sea B-52 Intercepts As An "Intelligence Trap" For The Russians https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/pentagon-has-staged-black-sea-b-52-i… ... The report describes that at the very moment the Russian fighters were coming extremely close to the B-52, even reportedly limiting its movement and coming within a mere 100 feet, two US RC-135 Rivet Joint electronic-intelligence planes were nearby scooping up useful data on the Su-27 aircraft. Ultimately the "trap" netted valuable intelligence on the Russian anti-air response and technology. ... Sorry if that's a little too lighthearted folks, it's just, I dunno, we need to lighten things up, and this one just tickles the funny bone. Let me just say for the record though, "Oh, dear me, those Russians must be just licking their wounds, they just gave up all that huge, huge sigint data to our glorious StratoFortress - yes, we are really awesome and those silly, silly Russians must be feeling so, so sad." There, I'm sure that improves our essential propaganda situation.

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Phys.org: Revolutionary quantum breakthrough paves way for safer online communication
by jim bell 06 Sep '20

06 Sep '20

Phys.org: Revolutionary quantum breakthrough paves way for safer online communication. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-revolutionary-quantum-breakthrough-paves-safe…

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