December 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

People make poor decisions when believing anyone would ever be an enemy, combat excluded
by Karl 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

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We know how to build hyperintelligence [old]
by Karl 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

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Please state important information first [spam]
by Karl 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

and then proceed to say things in order of decreasing importance, for people who have capacity to attend further. This is very important. Boss, who is responsible for all genocides the world over, has a whole internet and globe of sentient humans, to pull his wild mind control AI out of, and it's filtering and mutating our communications as we try. Say what's important first.

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[wrong][crazy] remailer notes
by Karl 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

I haven't ever been much interested in remailers, preferring overlay networks, but have been repeatedly implied to look into them by varied sources remailers have a public key, which rocks mail and transmission instructions are encrypted to the remailer via normal email the remailer decrypts, and sends on. this can let one form onions. including with cover traffic, I imagine - I wonder how to find remailers - I wonder what codebase is presently in wide use - I wonder if there's a way to measure traffic - I wonder if a remailer codebase is portable to public logging, to measure cover traffic and reveal a portion of any possible compromises

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Another Day - Another MIT horror-story
by professor rat 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

futurism.com MIT Professor Warns That Cartels Could Use “Slaughterbots” to Evade Justice Cheap, lightweight killer robots are just around the corner — and major military powers, including the US, are doing very little to stop them.

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That Turkey shithole again
by professor rat 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

kevincollier · 22h A lot of cyber folks have been predicting that state-sponsored hackers would exploit log4j, and last night attributions started dropping. Mandiant seeing China and Iran using it; Microsoft seeing those plus North Korea and Turkey.

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To Hell with nationalism - its the internet century
by professor rat 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

Great Protocol Politics The 21st century doesn’t belong to China, the United States, or Silicon Valley. It belongs to the internet. https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/11/bitcoin-ethereum-cryptocurrency-web3-g…

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Cryptocurrency: IBM+Samsung Chips Cut Energy 85%
by grarpamp 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

https://www.news-journal.com/ibm-and-samsung-unveil-semiconductor-breakthro… IBM And Samsung Jointly Announce "Breakthrough" Semiconductor That Uses 85% Less Energy If you're like us, you've been wondering what the hell IBM has been doing for the last few years. Today, it looks like we may have part of an answer. Big Blue revealed this morning in a press release that it had been working jointly with Samsung and had achieved a "breakthrough" in semiconductor design that could reduce energy usage by 85%. The two companies announced jointly a "breakthrough in semiconductor design utilizing a new vertical transistor architecture that demonstrates a path to scaling beyond nanosheet, and has the potential to reduce energy usage by 85 percent compared to a scaled fin field-effect transistor". The announcement comes in the midst of a global semiconductor shortage which many believe may not end fully until 2023. "The two companies' semiconductor innovation was produced at the Albany Nanotech Complex in Albany, NY, where research scientists work in close collaboration with public and private sector partners to push the boundaries of logic scaling and semiconductor capabilities," the press release said. The release listed some potential benefits for the breakthrough, including: Potential device architecture that enables semiconductor device scaling to continue beyond nanosheet. Cell phone batteries that could go over a week without being charged, instead of days. Energy intensive processes, such as cryptomining operations and data encryption, could require significantly less energy and have a smaller carbon footprint. Continued expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) and edge devices with lower energy needs, allowing them to operate in more diverse environments like ocean buoys, autonomous vehicles, and spacecraft. Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President, Hybrid Cloud and Systems, IBM Research, commented: "Today's technology announcement is about challenging convention and rethinking how we continue to advance society and deliver new innovations that improve life, business and reduce our environmental impact." He continued: "Given the constraints the industry is currently facing along multiple fronts, IBM and Samsung are demonstrating our commitment to joint innovation in semiconductor design and a shared pursuit of what we call 'hard tech.'"

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Cryptocurrency: SPLC Says Dollar Is Used For Hate, Ban It
by grarpamp 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

Bitcoin Unbound: When Freedom Money Is Used For Hate https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-unbound-freedom-money-for-hate Bitcoin’s technological innovation is available for anyone to use, even bigots; but this shouldn’t sully the entire network’s reputation... The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) issued a new report on the use of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies by white supremacists and far-right extremists. In the report, Megan Squire, senior fellow for data analytics, and senior investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden, link 600 addresses to white supremacists, estimating they hold “tens of millions of dollars” worth of value. Kevin Collier and Brandy Zadrozny, writing for NBC News, then picked up the story, running with the headline, “Bitcoin Surge Was A Windfall For White Supremacists, Research Finds.” Bitcoiners know what to do: take a deep breath. Let the FUD flow through you. Maintain stoic equanimity. For more than a decade, the media has tarred this open-source protocol, and those of us who use it, by association with all manner of evil: money laundering, tax evasion, terrorist financing, ponzi scamming, and my personal favorite, the boiling of oceans. Such poorly-argued and ill-informed attacks can be calmly dispatched or simply ignored. We stack sats. We stay humble. It’s just another day in the life of a bitcoiner. But this one hits differently. White supremacism is real, and it is repugnant. For those of us in Portland, Oregon, hate groups regularly march into our town and demonstrate, seeking out violent encounters on the streets. For targeted individuals — which I am not — these groups represent not only an attack on their personhood and dignity but a threat to their safety and bodily integrity. So it’s hard to let this particular story simply pass by without comment. Neither the original report nor the subsequent NBC story provide context for their findings. Their point is simply that fringe political groups control 600 addresses and potentially tens of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. What they fail to mention, however, is that there are more than 200 million non-empty bitcoin addresses worldwide and nearly a trillion dollars of value in bitcoin. That means these hate groups hold .0003% of addresses and at least 0.0001% of bitcoin’s value, a far less compelling headline. Imagine Amazon stock ownership could be tracked on a public ledger and some white supremacists were relatively early investors, now constituting .0003% of shareholders. Would it taint the entire company and all other shareholders? Would it merit a news story that made no qualifications and provided no context? I think we know the answers. Neither the original report nor the NBC story observes that the same censorship resistance that makes bitcoin useful to hate groups in the U.S. is also what allows it to support dissidents and oppressed minorities from Palestine to Cuba to Nigeria to Belarus. Readers of Bitcoin Magazine who follow the work of human rights activist Alex Gladstein will be familiar with dozens of such examples. The SPLC researchers do not track wallets of women in Afghanistan — nor should they!— who were paid in bitcoin as far back as 2013. Their windfalls allowed one to start a new life in Germany, another to pay her college tuition in the U.S. The researchers do not track — nor should they! — the wallets of the Feminist Coalition in Nigeria, whose bank accounts were frozen, and who turned to bitcoin instead. The researchers do not track — nor should they! — the wallets of Cuban bitcoiners, whose peso has lost two thirds of its value since the end of 2020, and who, without bitcoin, may have been unable to afford basic necessities. Yet, without such tracking, the mere fact that 600 wallets are controlled by white supremacists tells us nothing about who is benefiting from bitcoin on the whole. These researchers also seem unaware that bitcoin’s international usage correlates with low national ratings of democracy, government integrity, investment freedom, monetary freedom, and property rights. Bitcoin thrives wherever money and good governance is failing. Turning to the domestic scene, these researchers seem unaware that while only 11% of white Americans own cryptocurrencies, 23% of Black Americans and 17% of Hispanic Americans do. In sum, the “windfall” accruing to a handful of white supremacists in the U.S. also lifted millions worldwide. But instead of any attempt to see how bitcoin is being used more broadly, the identities behind 600 wallets are used to besmirch bitcoin itself – and others who’d use it – while the remaining 199,999,400 wallets are ignored. The NBC story does, at least, frankly acknowledge how easy it is to track payments simply by pairing social-media-posted addresses with on-chain transactions: “The list of 600 addresses we analyzed is just a big list that I made of who owns what, and the way that we get those is just watching these guys tell each other where to send the money,” Squire said. “It’s just literally just looking this stuff up on this public ledger.” And isn't that kind of transparency novel and refreshing? Especially when compared with the by-design opacity of offshore shell companies and cold hard cash, neither of which lends itself to this kind of investigative journalism? But the stories make no mention of these alternatives. The most glaring omission from a progressive Bitcoiner perspective is any consideration of the actual currency with the closest ties to white supremacism, namely, the U.S. dollar itself. The dollar’s value accrued to whites first through violent conquest, then literal enslavement, and thereafter, by Jim Crow segregation, financial redlining, and mass incarceration. To focus on the use of 600 bitcoin addresses by white supremacists while ignoring this shameful, systemic legacy of racism betrays a disturbing lack of perspective. Neither the racist history of the dollar nor the revolutionary potential of bitcoin is, of course, lost on Black Bitcoiners. Dawdu M. Amantanah, in “Closing The Wealth Gap: Black America And Bitcoin Adoption,” highlights Bitcoin’s decentralization, which means the monetary network, unlike traditional banking, offers financial inclusion, and the promise of financial freedom, to all. As Twitter persona Lawrence Douglas, aka @AxeCapYa, who publishes a newsletter called “Black And Bullish,” explains, “Bitcoin is the first asset that allows the average citizen to participate in a global financial system on equal footing. Its low barrier of entry allows bitcoin to transform the financial lives of those that choose to adopt it as a long-term store of value.” Black bitcoin is its own universe with books like “Bitcoin And Black America” by Isaiah Jackson, “Bitcoin And Black Powernomics,” by Will Hobdy, and “From Bars to Bitcoin” by Justin Rhedrick, as well as websites, Twitter spaces, Clubhouse chat rooms, podcasts, clubs, newsletters, fin-tech apps, and conferences. This burgeoning world, created entirely by and for Black investors is aimed at financial education and entrepreneurship, encouraging Black ownership through bitcoin and cryptocurrency. SPLC and NBC fail to acknowledge its existence. It must be said that certain corners of the Bitcoin community are, in fact, bigoted in a variety of ways. I have witnessed instances of it myself. And we must all, always condemn such bigotry when encountered, simply as a matter of decency and humanity. Something similar was true in the early days of the internet, when neo-Nazis recruited on online bulletin boards. As a percentage, white supremacy groups probably marred the internet to a greater degree then, than they pollute the Bitcoin blockchain now, and in fact, such online recruiting is still a problem. YouTube and Facebook algorithms have probably done as much as anything to radicalize segments of our society. Yet few are calling for a shutdown of the internet or shaming all its users because it is a neo-Nazi recruiting tool. Instead, we recognize the issue’s inherent difficulty: there are unavoidable tradeoffs between freedom of expression, utility, and safety, and we recognize, too, the perils of designating and empowering authorities on the matter of what speech should and should not be permitted by global networks of communication. Perhaps it is too much to ask for subtlety, for complexity, in an era of clicks. But the real issue here is whether, on balance, the benefits of bitcoin's censorship resistance outweigh the negative consequences of bitcoin being spent in odious ways and accrued by nefarious characters. Here lies a deep philosophical question about the proper reach and limits of our rights to property and exchange, as well as an empirical question about what positive and negative outcomes are enabled by Bitcoin’s technology. Absent proper comparisons, absent context about the network as a whole, absent imagination about the possibilities for bitcoin ranging across the whole moral spectrum, we're left with an icky feeling, but nothing of substance. Maybe that was the point.

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Ars Technica: A potential hangup for quantum computing: Cosmic rays
by jim bell 16 Dec '21

16 Dec '21

Ars Technica: A potential hangup for quantum computing: Cosmic rays. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/cosmic-rays-can-swamp-error-correct… Jim Bell's comment: "Shades of alpha-particle-induced soft-errors!!!" Partial Quote from article: "Recently, when researchers were testing error correction on Google's quantum processor, they noted an odd phenomenon where the whole error-correction scheme would sporadically fail badly. They chalked this up to background radiation, a combination of cosmic rays and the occasional decay of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope." "It seemed like a bit of an amusing aside at the time—Google having accidentally paid for an extremely expensive cosmic ray detector. But the people behind the processor took the problem very seriously and are back with a new paper that details exactly how the radiation affects the qubits. And they conclude that the problems caused by cosmic rays happen often enough to keep error-corrected quantum computations from working unless we figure out a way to limit the rays' impact." It’s a shame about the rays "Cosmic rays and radioactivity cause problems for classical computing hardware as well. That's because classical computers rely on moving and storing charges, and cosmic rays can induce charges when they impact a material. Qubits, by contrast, store information in the form of the quantum state of an object—in the case of Google's processor, a loop of superconducting wire linked to a resonator. Cosmic rays affect these, too, but the mechanism is completely different." (End of partial quote) My proposed solution? Maybe have a portion of the quantum circuitry doing 'dummy calculations', whose expected output is known. If an error in those calculations occurs, that will likely indicate a failure in the relevant calculstions.

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