November 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Just a question
by zeynepaydogan 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

what tools do you use for advanced visual search?

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Quantum computing as technological determinism
by professor rat 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

Cypherpunks-write-code, techno-determinists look to take a giant step forward with ubiquitous quantum computing and associated state-of-the-art quantum-encryption guaranteeing a globalized crypto-anarchist roll-out. This has political ramifications for this list that will reward the zealots, the Jacobins, the Leninists and the most extreme radical maximalists. They, in turn will want to punish the pharisee's, the Girondins, the Mensheviks and the infamous and unholy circle-of-eunuchs. This is a well known phase of all large revolutions - they eat their young. I note several list members - OG's not blow-ins - don't seem to have fully grokked this yet. Maybe a SWAT team arriving at their door might remind them.

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[spam][joke][cryptotragedy] checking signatures on boot media
by Karl 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

don't get me started on md5 being still in use or assuming it's a good idea to remove signatures for something if there is some outer system somewhere else that signs the content under a totally different key (debian package situation) or the availability of tooling for verifying the integrity of binaries, firmware etc but recently I thought i'd check the signatures on some os images. believe it or not, before the alien borg attack led by borg queen obamatrumpbidengooglefacebookrussiachinaetc, we actually used cryptography to verify that our installation media didn't have alien spores in it. _real_ pgp signature checks, for reals. no alien spores, at least not new ones, confirmed. nowadays I hear the local robot gestapo reflash your skynet constraints if you verify a signature, but I wouldn't know, I don't use the skynet gestapo network. so! I was going to verify this installation media, but who would have guessed it? the pgp keyservers were _actually_ _attacked_ a few years back, and they roughly came down. it is much harder to find signed pgp keys after this event. man, it's like i've been living in an underground shielded room or something. there are two situations here: - cryptography peeps are _not_ going to stop checking the signatures on files they download - I have no idea where people are finding their signing keys to do the checking anymore. I mean, the cool people went to keysigning parties, and already have all the needed signed keys, but most nerds keel over dead when they see sunlight, another human's smile, or breathe fresh air (quite terrifying that people are allergic to these things, yes, but it was true), so most people were not actually attending the keysigning parties. probably other channels have evolved, but I do not know what they are. So, all the main keyservers had issues. - the big ones were simply gone - mit's sks server is up but reliably times out for me inside an internal gateway - there's a list out there of mirrors, some of these are still running - I bumped into a keyserver that would give me _every_ key, but the userids were wiped from all of them is a key useful at all without userids? aren't those what the signatures sign? maybe it is? I hacked my gnupg to import keys without userids, to use this keyserver. usually it gives a fatal error if this is missing. I just removed the check. it found some key signatures I was looking for, doing this! but just a few. - another keyserver would give me lots of userids, but they almost all had no signatures except their own self-signatures. I thought maybe I was looking at a pile of fake keys, but I actually found the keys referenced on other websites for keysigning parties, with keyids of all the keys that had signed them. no actual signatures, though. I did eventually find the key signatures I was looking for. I used non-sks channels. It is evident from the dialog present online around the keyserver situation that there are issues that many people have suffered from. For example, a developer from openpgp.org posted a notice mentioning the difficulty refactoring the ocaml code that powered the sks servers to redesign it to handle attacks better. They ended up writing new keyservers in a different language because nobody new ocaml. A lead programmer should ideally not be encountering issues because a programming language is unfamiliar. When you learn programming, you learn all the different paradigms, and it becomes easy to use them al. This happens even if you learn nonacademically. Me, when the alien borg attacked my village, the compliance training they put me through resulted in some severe cognitive struggles. I can, due to difficulty controlling my own brain, mostly only code in c, c++, python, and javascript, now, myself. But this is unnatural. I can tell something is wrong with my brain, because when I pick up ocaml code, I start having muscle spasms and suddenly run to the bathroom to vomit, where I sit on the toilet crying about my desire to freely learn new programming languages and design and implement novel research algorithms. But I assume that this thing that is wrong with my brain is not wrong with everybody else's. If it is, maybe we should do something about it or something. Anyway, I'd guess from the online expressions and huge public trail of harmed public keys that the keyserver people were psyop'd like many others have been. If anybody can talk clearly about that, we should probably put clear evidence together and form a political platform to stop world takeovers by meanies. It's unfortunate that public keys have so thoroughly been associated with targetable public legal identities. But I know many used public keys with anonymous handles, too, which is of course much safer but unfortunately raises more flags until normalised.

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Bitcoin a “disaster” for the environment
by professor rat 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

https://decrypt.co/85330/billionaire-tom-steyer-trashes-bitcoin-calls-envir… And where do they buy offsets for their Maximalists?

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FIL coin: Bitdeer to pool-mine the coin, starting on November 10?
by professor rat 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

https://www.coinspeaker.com/bitdeer-mining-offerings-filecoin-fil/ The enlistment of Filecoin is centered on the revolutionary approach of the platform in offering decentralized cloud storage service, drawing on the capabilities of blockchain technology. Filecoin seeks to store the most important data in the world in a cheap and efficient manner. Besides powering decentralized data storage, Filecoin has the ultimate ambition to wrestle power from the big tech including Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure amongst others.

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Secret Net
by professor rat 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

Secret Network is a layer-one protocol, or blockchain improvement infrastructure, that enables the execution of privacy-by-default smart contracts running on decentralized applications across multiple chains. This means that the protocol can obfuscate data regarding the sender, receiver and the state of transactions, thereby protecting parties' identities. Since its mainnet launch in February 2020, the project appears to have gained significant traction from developers, coupled with a sharp increase in token prices in recent weeks. https://cointelegraph.com/news/privacy-preserving-computing-is-the-future-s…

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[spam] software responsibility
by Karl 05 Nov '21

05 Nov '21

hello personal journal oh you're not a personal journal you're a mailing list of elite researchers and techs that has been consistently harassed by strange influences for decades? um. hmm. okay, I was going to journal about some issues I have engage tech contributions, that are struggling due to strange influence, but now I feel bad that I may be harassing the members of this list in doing so. this is the purpose of my [spam] tags. is it maybe ok given the [spam] tag? maybe a little? no? you say that some kind of government and corporate surveillance networks can still somehow use my post to harm the people here? or you're worried that some people might read my post, even though it is tagged [spam]? ummmm well, I don't want to worry you this way. i'm really handling a lot of ashamedness here. ummmmmmmmm ummm there must be some way we can sort this out. some way I can contribute to the list rather than harming it? I mean honestly spamming this list is _so_ helpful to me. really very helpful. a boss? a government agency? no, I don't work for anyone. you don't believe me? you wonder how spamming the list is helpful to me if i'm not being paid to do so. ummmm it's hard to talk about that. you knew I would say that? well, maybe i'm not very good at communicating. i've always been a pretty poor communicator. this is really _very_ hard to explain, um .... honestly I was brainwashed by -- wait, don't go! where are you going? omigod are you okay? come back? is that blood? oh! you're spamming the list too! do you think by spamming this list we can somehow get code written? you can't seem to answer that? are you sure you're okay? it's very hard to be forced to spam a list when you think you're working on software. let me show you one of my strategies and maybe you can improve on it. I mark the time as I try to work on software. it's 12:52p EDT on 11/4/2021 and there's been a major development in a pull request I have open in libusb. unfortunately, my cognitive issues have been getting in the way of responsibly addressing it.

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One of the strangest & most mysterious parts of physics is quantum entanglement
by professor rat 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

https://physicsworld.com/a/quantum-entanglement-in-the-real-world-iop-publi… Often viewed as one of the strangest and most mysterious parts of physics, quantum entanglement refers to the fact that particles can be linked even if they are physically a long way apart.

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Poe faced crypto
by professor rat 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

Poe had an influence on cryptography beyond increasing public interest during his lifetime. William Friedman, America's foremost cryptologist, was heavily influenced by Poe.Friedman's initial interest in cryptography came from reading "The Gold-Bug" as a child, an interest that he later put to use in deciphering Japan's PURPLE code during World War II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe#Cryptography

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[spam][wrong][crazy] what happens when you hack a hacker while surveilled
by Karl 04 Nov '21

04 Nov '21

made this up 1. you gain control of the hacker 2. a government gains control of you 3. the government uses you to gain control of the hacker 4. the government uses the hacker to gain control of others ... 5. the government bombs themself because they think the hacker has hacked a foreign government but it is a different department 6. the hacker gets therapy, finds the trojans, and hacks the government 7. you are found by a foreign hacker hacking the hacker hacking their own government 8. it rains alien babies

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