October 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

CIA InQTel Funds Wickr to Backdoor Your Crypto, Reboots DeepState to Backdoor You
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dawk/wickr-cia-funding-inqtel https://taibbi.substack.com/p/yes-virginia-there-is-a-deep-state Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State A major untold story of the Trump era has been the political comeback of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, who thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign now enjoy widespread support among young liberals

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Cryptocurrency: CBDC AI-GunBot-Dog Nightmare World
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/cbdcs https://sworddefense.com/spur/ Fight back!

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Zero-knowledge for all Ether-Huffers
by professor rat 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

“Loopring is an open protocol for building decentralized exchanges. Loopring operates as a public set of smart contracts responsible for trade and settlement, with an off-chain group of actors aggregating and communicating orders. The protocol is free, extensible, and serves as a standardized building block for decentralized applications (dApps) that incorporate exchange functionality.” https://crypto-economy.com/loopring-protocol/

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Documentary: Kim Dotcom - Caught In The Web / Most Wanted Man Online
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ZPcJ5WDE8 Dotcom Caught in the Web / MWMO infohash:efcb90013b34d72cfdea851372969ca14ea2ec8e Dotcom Caught in the Web The story of the crypto internet is just beginning... Stay tuned.

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Cryptocurrency: Of Crypto Citadels, Rocket Ships, and The Game
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

“It’s basically a metaphor for the sovereign individual.” The Citadel “is a visualization of the kind of world they genuinely want to build - a world full of Singapores” “It’s a way to visualize and contextualize the promised wealth” “A giant supervillain house? I desire that” Since forever, libertarians have dreamed up these sorts of cosseted micro-communities, and it wholly gels with their twofold just-leave-me-the-hell-alone/have-fun-staying-poor set of political beliefs. And, rather ominously, crypto people are actually getting close to building these things... https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliversmith/2018/11/13/bitcointopia-how-libert… https://decrypt.co/63255/satoshi-cruise-ship-sold-to-new-owners-will-it-sai… https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voyage-satoshi-cryp… https://decrypt.co/20969/nevadas-170-million-blockchain-city-facing-challen… https://www.satoshishores.com/ https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1446491969207869467 https://twitter.com/haggishodl/status/1447182929604628488 https://twitter.com/de3CODE/status/1448141628699467781 https://twitter.com/KenobiNakamoto/status/1447861584999690249 https://twitter.com/BitcoinMemeHub/status/1448797963665305639 https://twitter.com/hashtag/SatsGame I am a time-traveler from the future, here to beg you to stop what you are doing. 2013/08/31 Luka Magnotta I am sending this message from the year 2025. Things are looking bleak here, and some of you will carry blood on your hands. If you don't believe me, please move on, as I have no way of proving to you I'm really who I claim to be. I don't want to waste any of your time, so I'm merely going to explain what happened. On average, every year so far, the value of Bitcoin has increased by about a factor ten. From 0.1 dollar in 2010, to 1 dollar in 2011, to 10 dollar in 2012, to 100 dollar in 2013. From now on, there's a slight slowdown, as the value increased by a factor ten every two years, to 1,000 dollar in 2015, to 10,000 in 2017, 100,000 in 2019, and 1,000,000 in 2021. From here onwards, there's no good way of expressing its value in dollars, as the dollar is no longer used, nor is any central bank issued currency for that matter. There are two main forms of wealth in today's world. Land and cryptocurrency. There are just over 19 million Bitcoin known to be used in the world today, as well as a few hundred thousand that were permanently lost, and we're still dealing with a population of just over 7 billion people today. On average, this means the average person owns just under 0.003 bitcoin. However, due to the unequal distribution of wealth in my world, the mean person owns just 0.001 bitcoin. That's right, most of you reading this today are rich. I personally live next to an annoying young man who logged into his old Reddit account two years ago and discovered that he received a tip of 0.01 Bitcoin back in 2013 for calling someone a "faggot" when he was a 16 year old boy. Upon making this discovery he bought an airline ticket, left his house without telling anyone anything and went to a Citadel. "What is a Citadel?" you might wonder. Well, by the time Bitcoin became worth 1,000 dollar, services began to emerge for the "Bitcoin rich" to protect themselves as well as their wealth. It started with expensive safes, then began to include bodyguards, and today, "earlies" (our term for early adapters), as well as those rich whose wealth survived the "transition" live in isolated gated cities called Citadels, where most work is automated. Most such Citadels are born out of the fortification used to protect places where Bitcoin mining machines are located. The company known as ASICminer to you is known to me as a city where Mr. Friedman rules as a king. In my world, soon to be your world, most governments no longer exist, as Bitcoin transactions are done anonymously and thus most governments can enforce no taxation on their citizens. Most of the success of Bitcoin is due to the fact that Bitcoin turned out to be an effective method to hide your wealth from the government. Whereas people entering "rogue states" like Luxemberg, Monaco and Liechtenstein were followed by unmanned drones to ensure that governments know who is hiding wealth, no such option was available to stop people from hiding their money in Bitcoin. Governments tried to stay relevant in my society by buying Bitcoin, which just made the problem worse, by increasing the value of Bitcoin. Governments did so in secret of course, but my generation's "Snowdens" are in fact greedy government employees who transferred Bitcoin to their own private account, and escaped to anarchic places where no questions are asked as long as you can cough up some money. The four institutions with the largest still accessible Bitcoin balance are believed to be as following: -ASICminer - 50,000 Bitcoin -The IMF's "currency stabilization fund" - 70,000 Bitcoin -Government of Saudi Arabia - 110,000 Bitcoin -The North Korean government - 180,000 Bitcoin Economic growth today is about -2% per year. Why is this? If you own more than 0.01 Bitcoin, chances are you don't do anything with your money. There is no inflation, and thus no incentive to invest your money. Just like the medieval ages had no significant economic growth, as wealth was measured in gold, our society has no economic growth either, as people know their 0.01 Bitcoin will be enough to last them a lifetime. The fact that there are still new Bitcoin released is what prevents our world from collapse so far it seems, but people fear that the decline in inflation that will occur during the next block halving may further wreck our economy. What happened to the Winklevoss twins? The Winklevoss twins were among the first to die. After seeing the enormous damage done to the fabric of society, terrorist movements emerged that sought to hunt down and murder anyone known to have a large balance of Bitcoin, or believed to be responsible in any way for the development of cryptocurrency. Ironically, these terrorist movements use Bitcoin to anonymously fund their operations. Most people who own any significant amount of Bitcoin no longer speak to their families and lost their friends, because they had to change their identities. There have been also been a few suicides of people who could not handle the guilt after seeing what happened to the bag-holders, the type of skeptical people who continued to believe it would eventually collapse, even after hearing the rumors of governments buying Bitcoin. Many people were taken hostage, and thus, it is suspected that 25% percent of "Bitcoin rich" actually physically tortured someone to get him to spill his password. Why didn't we abandon Bitcoin, and move to another system? Well, we tried of course. We tried to step over to an inflationary cryptocurrency, but nobody with an IQ above 70 was willing to step up first and volunteer. After all, why would you voluntarily invest a lot of your money into a currency where you know your wealth will continually decline? The thing that made Bitcoin so dangerous to society was also what made it so successful. Bitcoin allows us to give into our greed. In Africa, surveys show that an estimated 70% of people believe that Bitcoin was invented by the devil himself. There's a reason for this. It's a very sensitive issue that today is generally referred to as "the tragedy". The African Union had ambitious plans to help its citizens be ready to step over to Bitcoin. Governments gave their own citizens cell phones for free, tied to their government ID, and thus government sought to integrate Bitcoin into their economy. All went well, until "the tragedy" that is. A criminal organization, believed to be located in Russia, exploited a hardware fault in the government issued cell phones. It's believed that the entire continent of Africa lost an estimated 60% of its wealth in a period of 48 hours. What followed was a period of chaos and civil war, until the Saudi Arabian and North Korean governments, two of the world's major superpowers due to their authoritarian political system's unique ability to adapt to the "Bitcoin challenge", divided most African land between themselves and were praised as heroes by the local African population for it. You might wonder, what is our plan now? It's clear that the current situation can not be sustained, without ending in a nuclear holocaust. I am part of an underground network, who seek to launch a coordinated attack against the very infrastructure of the Internet itself. We have at our disposal about 20 nuclear submarines, which we will use to cut all underwater cables between different continents. After this has been successfully achieved, we will launch a simultaneous nuclear pulse attack on every densely population area of the world. We believe that the resulting chaos will allow the world's population to rise up in revolt, and destroy as many computers out there as possible, until we reach the point where Bitcoin loses any relevance. Of course, this outcome will likely lead to billions of deaths. This is a price we are forced to pay, to avoid the eternal enslavement of humanity to a tiny elite. This is also the reason we contacted you. It doesn't have to be like this. You do not have to share our fate. I don't know how, but you must find a way to destroy this godforsaken project in its infancy. I know this is a difficult thing to ask of you. You believed you were helping the world by eliminating the central banking cartel that governs your economies. However, I have seen where it ends. Update, 27 oktober 2019: Well gee, this blew up. Bitcoin should not be treated as an investment, it should be recognized as a speculative negative-sum game. The Bitcoin system currently consumes an estimated 3.6 billion dollar worth of electricity on an annualized basis, just to update the ledger that contains a record of everyone's transactions. This enormous consumption of electricity is indirectly paid for by people who invest their savings in Bitcoin, as a consequence, money is continually "leaking" from the system. As a Bitcoin investor, you're paying for Chinese businesses to waste electricity by solving an abstract math problem that is designed to get continually more difficult. Besides ensuring that many people lose vast sums of money while a small minority of early adapters is enriched, Bitcoin causes tremendous ecological damage in an era when we should be focusing as a society on reducing our carbon emissions. The Bitcoin developers responsible for updating the protocol appear to have no genuine intention to introduce code changes that reduce the ecological damage caused by Bitcoin mining, so my suggestion has to be to sell your Bitcoins, which indirectly has the effect of reducing the ecological damage caused by Bitcoin mining. Theft and loss of coins are also enormous problems affecting Bitcoin, so although it is theoretically possible to store your coins in a safe manner, history has shown that a lot of people will simply lose their coins, further illustrating why Bitcoin is not a good investment option. The other cryptocurrencies share most of Bitcoin's flaws (resource waste, no protection against theft or loss, vulnerable to market manipulation, etc), but most importantly, what sets cryptocurrencies apart from proper investments is that these coins don't produce anything. If you invest in a company, that company can use the money to deliver more products. If you buy, silver, gold, bitcoin or beanie babies, you're hoping someone else will come along one day and pay more money for it. History has shown that people who invest money in the stock market will generally end up witnessing much higher returns than people who buy gold. With that said, I hope this story has entertained you and helped you recognize some of the problems our society would face if we ever witnessed widespread adaption of Bitcoin or similar digital currencies.

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SpyVeillance 0-Day Exploits: Journos Attacked w Pegasus for Reporting on Pegasus Vax
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://citizenlab.ca/2021/10/breaking-news-new-york-times-journalist-ben-h… https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware) https://darknetlive.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_for_zero-day_exploits https://tsyrklevich.net/2015/07/22/hacking-team-0day-market/ https://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12615258/nsa-security-breach-hoard https://cybernews.com/news/zerodium-is-looking-to-buy-exploits-for-nordvpn-… https://zerodium.com/program.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zerodium https://www.cbsnews.com/news/interview-with-ceo-of-nso-group-spyware-maker-… https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/soldiers-burst-in-the-back-door-to-tortu… https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13718768/uk-surveillance-laws-explained… https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-deal-surveillanc… https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/sep/27/senior-cia-officials-trump-di… https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24665 https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt-1909623 https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vaccination-campaig…

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EFF and Gilmore: Secret Spat Results in Break Up and Divorce
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/10/john-gilmore-leaves-eff-board-becomes… 76-year-old John Gilmore co-founded the EFF in 1990, and in the 31 years since he's "provided leadership and guidance on many of the most important digital rights issues we advocate for today," the EFF said in a statement Friday. "But in recent years, we have not seen eye-to-eye on how to best communicate and work together," they add, announcing "we have been unable to agree on a way forward with Gilmore in a governance role." That is why the EFF Board of Directors has recently made the difficult decision to vote to remove Gilmore from the Board. We are deeply grateful for the many years Gilmore gave to EFF as a leader and advocate, and the Board has elected him to the role of Board Member Emeritus moving forward. "I am so proud of the impact that EFF has had in retaining and expanding individual rights and freedoms as the world has adapted to major technological changes," Gilmore said. "My departure will leave a strong board and an even stronger staff who care deeply about these issues." John Gilmore co-founded EFF in 1990 alongside John Perry Barlow, Steve Wozniak and Mitch Kapor, and provided significant financial support critical to the organization's survival and growth over many years. Since then, Gilmore has worked closely with EFF's staff, board, and lawyers on privacy, free speech, security, encryption, and more. In the 1990s, Gilmore found the government documents that confirmed the First Amendment problem with the government's export controls over encryption, and helped initiate the filing of Bernstein v DOJ, which resulted in a court ruling that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional. The decision made it legal in 1999 for web browsers, websites, and software like PGP and Signal to use the encryption of their choice. Gilmore also led EFF's effort to design and build the DES Cracker, which was regarded as a fundamental breakthrough in how we evaluate computer security and the public policies that control its use. At the time, the 1970s Data Encryption Standard (DES) was embedded in ATM machines and banking networks, as well as in popular software around the world. U.S. government officials proclaimed that DES was secure, while secretly being able to wiretap it themselves. The EFF DES Cracker publicly showed that DES was in fact so weak that it could be broken in one week with an investment of less than $350,000. This catalyzed the international creation and adoption of the much stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), now widely used to secure information worldwide.... EFF has always valued and appreciated Gilmore's opinions, even when we disagree. It is no overstatement to say that EFF would not exist without him. We look forward to continuing to benefit from his institutional knowledge and guidance in his new role of Board Member Emeritus. Gilmore also created the alt* hierarchy on Usenet, co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list, and was one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions (according to his page on Wikipedia). He's also apparently Slashdot user #35,813 (though he hasn't posted a comment since 2004).

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Cryptocurrency: Thiel Opines Lately on SpyVeillanceAI, Politics, Crypto
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/22/palantirs-peter-thiel-surveillance-ai-is-mo… https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/ https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1ynJOZQQeAnGR Tech billionaire Peter Thiel "believes that people should be more worried about 'surveillance AI' rather than artificial general intelligences," reports CNBC: The venture capitalist, who co-founded big data firm Palantir, said at an event in Miami on Wednesday that on the path to AGI, you get surveillance AI, which he described as a "communist totalitarian technology." Those that are worried about AGI aren't actually "paying attention to the thing that really matters," Thiel said, adding that governments will use AI-powered facial recognition technology to control people. His comments come three years after Bloomberg reported that "Palantir knows everything about you." Thiel has also invested in facial recognition company Clearview AI and surveillance start-up Anduril. Palantir, which has a market value of $48 billion, has developed data trawling technology that intelligence agencies and governments use for surveillance and to spot suspicious patterns in public and private databases. Customers reportedly include the CIA, FBI, and the U.S. Army.... Thiel, a well-known libertarian who also co-founded PayPal and holds a board seat at Facebook, said Silicon Valley isn't talking about AGI as much today as it was six or seven years ago... In the same talk, Thiel pitted AI against cryptocurrencies, saying that he'd prefer to see the latter one succeed. "If we say crypto is libertarian and that it is fundamentally a force for decentralization, then I think we should also be willing to say that AI, especially in the low-tech surveillance form, is essentially communist." "If you want to frame it as a technological race ... I want the crypto decentralized world to work," he said.

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SpyVeillance: License Plates, Ring Doorbells... Neighborhoods Flock'ing to Full Bore 1984
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/license-plate-scanners-were-supposed-to-b… https://www.flocksafety.com/flock-for-neighborhood-security/ http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/05/12/11-17892.pdf https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/06/23/opinion-at-gunpoint-police-handcuffe… https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/aurora-police-detain-black… It is not the errors, but the system itself, route around, shut it all down. "License plate readers are rapidly reshaping private security in American neighborhoods," reports the Washington Post, as aggressively-marketed $2,500-a-year "safety-as-a-service" packages "spread to cover practically everywhere anyone chooses to live in the United States" and "bringing police surveillance tools to the masses with an automated watchdog that records 24 hours a day." Flock Safety, the industry leader, says its systems have been installed in 1,400 cities across 40 states and now capture data from more than a billion cars and trucks every month. "This is not just for million-dollar homes," Flock's founder, Garrett Langley, said. "This is America at its core..." Its solar-powered, motion-sensing camera can snap a dozen photos of a single plate in less than a second — even in the dark, in the rain, of a car driving 100 mph up to 75 feet away, as Flock's marketing materials say. Piped into a neighborhood's private Flock database, the photos are made available for the homeowners to search, filter or peruse. Machine-learning software categorizes each vehicle based on two dozen attributes, including its color, make and model; what state its plates came from; and whether it had bumper stickers or a roof rack. Each "vehicle fingerprint" is pinpointed on a map and tracked by how often it had been spotted in the past month. The plates are also run against law enforcement watch lists for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives; if there's a match, the system alerts the nearest police force with details on how to track it down... Flock's customer base has roughly quadrupled since 2019, with police agencies and homeowners associations in more than 1,400 cities today, and the company has hired sales representatives in 30 states to court customers with promises of a safer, more-monitored life. Company officials have also attended town hall meetings and papered homeowners associations with glossy marketing materials declaring its system "the most user-friendly, least invasive way for communities to stop crime": a network of cameras "that see like a detective," "protect home values" and "automate [the] neighborhood watch ... while you sleep." Along the way, the Atlanta-based company has become an unlikely darling of American tech. The company said in July it had raised $150 million from prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, which said Flock was pursuing "a massive opportunity in shaping the future...." Flock deletes the footage every 30 days by default and encourages customers to search only when investigating crime. But the company otherwise lets customers set their own rules: In some neighborhoods, all the homeowners can access the images for themselves... Camera opponents didn't want the neighborhood's leaders to anoint themselves gatekeepers, choosing who does and doesn't belong. And they worried that if someone's car was broken into, but no one knew exactly when, the system could lead to hundreds of drivers, virtually all of them innocent, coming under suspicion for the crime. They also worried about the consequences of the cameras getting it wrong. In San Francisco, police had handcuffed a woman at gunpoint in 2009 after a camera garbled her plate number; another family was similarly detained last year because a thief had swiped their tag before committing a crime. And last year in Aurora, 30 miles from Paradise Hills, police handcuffed a mother and her children at gunpoint after a license plate reader flagged their SUV as stolen. The actual stolen vehicle, a motorcycle, had the same plate number from another state. Police officials have said racial profiling did not play a role, though the drivers in all three cases were Black. (The license plate readers in these cases were not Flock devices, and the company said its systems would have shown more accurate results...) The Paradise Hills opponents were right to be skeptical about a local crime wave. According to Jefferson County sheriff's records shared with The Post, the only crime reports written up since September 2020 included two damaged mailboxes, a fraudulent unemployment claim and some stuff stolen out of three parked cars, two of which had been left unlocked. "I wouldn't exactly say it's a hot spot," patrol commander Dan Aten told The Post... The cameras clicked on in August, a board member said. In the weeks since, the neighborhood hasn't seen any reports of crime. The local sheriff's office said it hasn't used the Flock data to crack any cases, nor has it found the need to ask. Flock's founder, Garrett Langley, nonetheless tells the Washington Post, "There are 17,000 cities in America. "Until we have them all, we're not done."

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FBI Sacrifices Innocents Again While Trying To Catch News Instead of Crooks
by grarpamp 25 Oct '21

25 Oct '21

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fbi-held-back-ransomware-decryption-key-f… https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/13/revil-disappears-kasey… America's Federal Bureau of Investigation "refrained for almost three weeks from helping to unlock the computers of hundreds of businesses and institutions hobbled by a major ransomware attack this summer," reports the Washington Post, "even though the bureau had secretly obtained the digital key needed to do so, according to several current and former U.S. officials." The key was obtained through access to the servers of the Russia-based criminal gang behind the July attack. Deploying it immediately could have helped the victims, including schools and hospitals, avoid what analysts estimate was millions of dollars in recovery costs. But the FBI held on to the key, with the agreement of other agencies, in part because it was planning to carry out an operation to disrupt the hackers, a group known as REvil, and the bureau did not want to tip them off. Also, a government assessment found the harm was not as severe as initially feared. The planned takedown never occurred because in mid-July REvil's platform went offline — without U.S. government intervention — and the hackers disappeared before the FBI had a chance to execute its plan, according to the current and former officials... The FBI finally shared the key with Kaseya, the IT company whose software was infected with malware, on July 21 — 19 days after it was hit. Kaseya asked New Zealand-based security firm Emsisoft to create a fresh decryption tool, which Kaseya released the following day. By then, it was too late for some victims... On Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, testifying before Congress, indicated the delay stemmed in part from working jointly with allies and other agencies. "We make the decisions as a group, not unilaterally," he said, noting that he had to constrain his remarks because the investigation was ongoing... He also suggested that "testing and validating" the decryption key contributed to the delay. "There's a lot of engineering that's required to develop a tool" that can be used by victims, he said at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing. Emsisoft, however, was able to act quickly. It extracted the key from what the FBI provided Kaseya, created a new decryptor and tested it — all within 10 minutes, according to Fabian Wosar, Emsisoft chief technology officer. The process was speedy because the firm was familiar with REvil's ransomware. "If we had to go from scratch," Wosar said, "it would have taken about four hours."

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