May 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

The countries that trusted bugged Swiss encryption devices
by jim bell 13 Aug '21

13 Aug '21

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/crypto-spying-scandal_the-countries-that-trust…

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Torsocks Errors
by Se7en 11 Aug '21

11 Aug '21

I am unable to torify my fetchmail anymore, because Torsocks prevents setguid programs from running, which does not interfeer with fetchmail but does interfeer with procmail. Does anyone know a solution? I am still able to send torified, but am unable to recieve torified via pop3 and I do not want to continue this behavior. -- |-----/ | Se7en / The One and Only! | se7en(a)cock.email / | 0x0F83F93882CF6116 / | https://se7en-site.neocities.org

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LibGen SciHub: Replication of Science Experiment - Seed for Success
by grarpamp 09 Jul '21

09 Jul '21

> in conformance with the Scientific Method: Successful Replication of Experiment. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_mission_for_sci… https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ndlfpp/scihub_files_current_s… http://libgen.rs/scimag/repository_torrent/ https://pastebin.com/j6ZaZe9z https://old.reddit.com/r/scihub https://old.reddit.com/r/libgen Some have been part of recent years efforts to preserve and enhance, distributed load and storage is key to keep seed the unseeded for futures... Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science: We are the library. DataHoarder by shrine Rescue Mission Links in original Quick start to rescuing Sci-Hub: Download 1 random torrent (100GB) from the scimag collection and download it. Seed forever. Contribute to open source Sci-Hub projects: freereadorg/awesome-libgen Join /r/scihub to stay up to date A Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science Elsevier and the USDOJ have declared war against Sci-Hub and open science. The era of Sci-Hub and Alexandra standing alone in this fight must end. We have to take a stand with her. On May 7th, Sci-Hub's Alexandra Elbakyan revealed that the FBI has been wiretapping her accounts for over 2 years. This news comes after Twitter silenced the official Sci_Hub twitter account because Indian academics were organizing on it against Elsevier. Sci-Hub itself is currently frozen and has not downloaded any new articles since December 2020. This rescue mission is focused on seeding the article collection in order to prepare for a potential Sci-Hub shutdown. Alexandra Elbakyan of Sci-Hub, bookwarrior of Library Genesis, Aaron Swartz, and countless unnamed others have fought to free science from the grips of for-profit publishers. Today, they do it working in hiding, alone, without acknowledgment, in fear of imprisonment, and even now wiretapped by the FBI. They sacrifice everything for one vision: Open Science. Why do they do it? They do it so that humble scholars on the other side of the planet can practice medicine, create science, fight for democracy, teach, and learn. People like Alexandra Elbakyan would give up their personal freedom for that one goal: to free knowledge. For that, Elsevier Corp (RELX, market cap: 50 billion) wants to silence her, wants to see her in prison, and wants to shut Sci-Hub down. It's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science: we are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many. Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub If you have been following the story, then you know that this is not our first rescue mission. We protected the Library Genesis book collection We unlocked over 5,000 COVID-19 research articles We successfully petitioned publishers to unlock their COVID-19 paywalls bookwarrior, the founder of Library Genesis, took his library onto the de-centralized and un-censorable IPFS web Next? Make Sci-Hub un-censorable too. Rescue Target A handful of Library Genesis seeders are currently seeding the Sci-Hub torrents. There are 850 scihub torrents, each containing 100,000 scientific articles, to a total of 85 million scientific articles: 77TB. This is the complete Sci-Hub database. We need to protect this. Rescue Team Wave 1: We need 85 datahoarders to store and seed 1TB of articles each, 10 torrents in total. Download 10 random torrents from the scimag collection, then load the torrents onto your client and seed for as long as you can. The articles are coded by DOI and in zip files. Wave 2: Reach out to 10 good friends to ask them to grab just 1 random torrent (100GB). That's 850 seeders. We are now the library. Final Wave: Development for an open source Sci-Hub. freereadorg/awesome-libgen is a collection of open source achievements based on the Sci-Hub and Library Genesis databases. Open source de-centralization of Sci-Hub is the ultimate goal here, and this begins with the data, but it is going to take years of developer sweat to carry these libraries into the future. Heartfelt thanks to the /r/datahoarder and /r/seedboxes communities, seedbox.io and NFOrce for your support for previous missions and your love for science.

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Covid Crazies
by coderman 20 Jun '21

20 Jun '21

when thinking of usability of security features, i always wonder about diminished mental states - how do you handle authentication when the mind is unstable? (biometrics work, but they cannot be the whole piece. e.g. scanning a dead finger...) --- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-mental.html Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms Most had no history of mental illness and became psychotic weeks after contracting the virus. Cases are expected to remain rare but are being reported worldwide. Almost immediately, Dr. Hisam Goueli could tell that the patient who came to his psychiatric hospital on Long Island this summer was unusual. The patient, a 42-year-old physical therapist and mother of four young children, had never had psychiatric symptoms or any family history of mental illness. Yet there she was, sitting at a table in a beige-walled room at South Oaks Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them. “It was like she was experiencing a movie, like ‘Kill Bill,’” Dr. Goueli, a psychiatrist, said. The patient described one of her children being run over by a truck and another decapitated. “It’s a horrifying thing that here’s this well-accomplished woman and she’s like ‘I love my kids, and I don’t know why I feel this way that I want to decapitate them,’” he said. The only notable thing about her medical history was that the woman, who declined to be interviewed but allowed Dr. Goueli to describe her case, had become infected with the coronavirus in the spring. She had experienced only mild physical symptoms from the virus, but, months later, she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children. At South Oaks, which has an inpatient psychiatric treatment program for Covid-19 patients, Dr. Goueli was unsure whether the coronavirus was connected to the woman’s psychological symptoms. “Maybe this is Covid-related, maybe it’s not,” he recalled thinking. - Thanks for reading The Times. [Subscribe to The Times](https://www.nytimes.com/subscription?campaignId=9L9L9) “But then,” he said, “we saw a second case, a third case and a fourth case, and we’re like, ‘There’s something happening.’” Indeed, doctors are reporting similar cases across the country and around the world. A small number of Covid patients who had never experienced mental health problems are developing severe psychotic symptoms weeks after contracting the coronavirus. In interviews and scientific articles, doctors described: A 36-year-old nursing home employee in North Carolina who became so paranoid that she believed her three children would be kidnapped and, to save them, tried to pass them through a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through window. A 30-year-old construction worker in New York City who became so delusional that he imagined his cousin was going to murder him, and, to protect himself, he tried to strangle his cousin in bed. Advertisement [Continue reading the main story](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-mental.htm… A 55-year-old woman in Britain had hallucinations of monkeys and a lion and became convinced a family member had been replaced by an impostor. Beyond individual reports, a British [study of neurological or psychiatric complications](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7316461/) in 153 patients hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 10 people had “new-onset psychosis.” Another study identified [10 such patients in one hospital in Spain](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178120315092?…. And in Covid-related social media groups, medical professionals discuss seeing patients with similar symptoms in the Midwest, Great Plains and elsewhere. “My guess is any place that is seeing Covid is probably seeing this,” said Dr. Colin Smith at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, who helped treat the North Carolina woman. He and other doctors said their patients were too fragile to be asked whether they wanted to be interviewed for this article, but some, including the [North Carolina woman](https://casereports.bmj.com/content/13/8/e236940), agreed to have their cases described in scientific papers. Medical experts say they expect that such extreme psychiatric dysfunction will affect only a small proportion of patients. But the cases are considered examples of another way the Covid-19 disease process can affect mental health and brain function. In Her Words: Where women rule the headlines. Although the coronavirus was initially thought primarily to cause respiratory distress, there is now ample evidence of many other symptoms, including [neurological](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/05/health/Covid-patients-ment…, cognitive and psychological effects, that could emerge even in patients who didn’t develop serious lung, heart or circulatory problems. Such symptoms can be just as debilitating to a person’s ability to function and work, and it’s often unclear [how long they will last or how to treat them](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/04/health/covid-long-term-symptoms.ht…. Experts increasingly believe brain-related effects may be linked to the body’s immune system response to the coronavirus and possibly to vascular problems or surges of inflammation caused by the disease process. “Some of the neurotoxins that are reactions to immune activation can go to the brain, through the blood-brain barrier, and can induce this damage,” said Dr. Vilma Gabbay, a co-director of the Psychiatry Research Institute at Montefiore Einstein in the Bronx. Brain scans, spinal fluid analyses and other tests didn’t find any brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital has treated [two patients](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7414775/?fbclid=IwAR… with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices and believed he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who began carrying a knife, disrobing in front of strangers and putting hand sanitizer in her food. Physically, most of these patients didn’t get very sick from Covid-19, reports indicate. The patients that Dr. Goueli treated experienced no respiratory problems, but they did have subtle neurological symptoms like hand tingling, vertigo, headaches or diminished smell. Then, two weeks to several months later, he said, they “develop this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary to all of the people around them.” Also striking is that most patients have been in their 30s, 40s and 50s. “It’s very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age range,” Dr. Goueli said, since such symptoms more typically accompany schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older patients. And some patients — like the physical therapist who took herself to the hospital — understood something was wrong, while usually “people with psychosis don’t have an insight that they’ve lost touch with reality.” Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis needed weeks of hospitalization in which doctors tried different medications before finding one that helped. Dr. Robert Yolken, a neurovirology expert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that although people might recover physically from Covid-19, in some cases their immune systems, might be unable to shut down or might remain engaged because of “delayed clearance of a small amount of virus.” Persistent immune activation is also a leading explanation for [brain fog](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/11/health/covid-survivors.html)and memory problems bedeviling many Covid survivors, and Emily Severance, a schizophrenia expert at Johns Hopkins, said post-Covid cognitive and psychiatric effects might result from “something similar happening in the brain.” It may hinge on which brain region the immune response affects, Dr. Yolken said, adding, “some people have neurological symptoms, some people psychiatric and many people have a combination.” Experts don’t know whether genetic makeup or perhaps an undetected predisposition for psychiatric illness put some people at greater risk. Dr. Brian Kincaid, medical director of psychiatric emergency department services at Duke, said the North Carolina woman once had a skin reaction to another virus, which might suggest her immune system responds zealously to viral infections. Sporadic cases of post-infectious psychosis and mania have occurred with other viruses, including the 1918 flu and the coronaviruses SARS and MERS. “We think that it’s not unique to Covid,” said Dr. Jonathan Alpert, chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who co-wrote the report on the Montefiore patients. He said studying these cases might help to increase doctors’ understanding of psychosis. The symptoms have ranged widely, some surprisingly severe for a first psychotic episode, experts said. Dr. Goueli said a 46-year-old pharmacy technician, whose family brought her in after she became fearful that evil spirits had invaded her home, “cried literally for four days” in the hospital. He said the 30-year-old construction worker, brought to the hospital by the police, became “extremely violent,” dismantling a hospital radiator and using its parts and his shoes to try to break out of a window. He also swung a chair at hospital staff. How long the psychosis lasted and patients’ response to treatment has varied. The woman in Britain — whose symptoms included paranoia about the color red and terror that nurses were devils who would harm her and a family member — took about 40 days to recover, according to [a case report](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7477483/#:~:text=To%20…. The 49-year-old man treated at Montefiore was discharged after several weeks’ hospitalization, but “he was still struggling two months out” and required readmission, Dr. Gabbay said. The North Carolina woman, who was convinced that cellphones were tracking her and that her partner would steal her pandemic stimulus money, didn’t improve with the first medication, said Dr. Jonathan Komisar at Duke, who said doctors initially thought her symptoms reflected bipolar disorder. “When we began to realize that maybe this isn’t going to resolve immediately,” he said, she was given an antipsychotic, risperidone and discharged in a week. The physical therapist who planned to murder her children had more difficulty. “Every day, she was getting worse,” Dr. Goueli said. “We tried probably eight different medicines,” including antidepressants, antipsychotics and lithium. “She was so ill that we were considering electroconvulsive therapy for her because nothing was working.” About two weeks into her hospitalization, she couldn’t remember what her 2-year-old looked like. Calls with family were heartbreaking because “‘You could hear one in the background saying ‘When is Mom coming home?’” Dr. Goueli said. “That brought her a lot of shame because she was like, ‘I can’t be around my kids and here they are loving me.’” Ultimately, risperidone proved effective and after four weeks, she returned home to her family, “95 percent perfect,” he said. “We don’t know what the natural course of this is,” Dr. Goueli said. “Does this eventually go away? Do people get better? How long does that normally take? And are you then more prone to have other psychiatric issues as a result? There are just so many unanswered questions.”

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Tor
by Karl 03 Jun '21

03 Jun '21

I'm looking at orbot and seeing it has "circuit padding" now. I don't know whether this meets the requirements of chaff, and would like to know. I want to point out that zenaan harkness compiled posts from this list about research attributes a technology needed, to stay anonymous. I haven't read them, myself: I'm only aware of the chaff issue. My way of making change in the world is to make a strange stink that could get authorities to take action for something unrelated. When they take the action, they stumble on information about corruption impact and try to fix the situation. Repeat until actually fixed, shift environments if needed. If I can get message delivery working for this list again, I can stick around to stay on issues like the forthrightness of Tor for defending journalists and activists. It would be helpful to know what is actually needed. I am very very very slow. Yes I do likely have schizophrenia and am posting this like a dream, yes I was brainwashed by something like a corporate mafia, and yes you can't clean up a blockchain on a timescale that anybody cares about.

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Ars Technica: Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors
by jim bell 02 Jun '21

02 Jun '21

Ars Technica: Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-soon-automatica… Jim Bell's comment:I've long believed that something like this could be good...if it is "done right" Unfortunately, I cannot tell what "done right" entails.

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agent grarpamp 'predicts' the poronga virus PSYOP
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 01 Jun '21

01 Jun '21

https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/2018-October/073195.html me: I originally was wondering about the NEXT false flag attack or inside job grarpamp: A good one would be a redux of the Anthrax mail game, but this time say some deadly bio agent in the water supply killing 10k+ from drinking but without transmitting further. Folks at US Fort Detrick and RU VECTOR certainly have that tech on standby, and the meme has been available to independants for a couple decades now. ------------ And then we have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Detrick "In August 2019, its deadly germ research operations were abruptly shutdown following serious safety violation" In reality, and contrary to grarpamps current bullshit-pentagon-propaganda regarding china, the false flag attack is purely 'psychological'. Still, it's quite telling that a pretty dubious character like grarpamp made a correct guess in 2018 and now switched to parroting pentagon propaganda for right wing trash(like him).

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TechRadar: Exclusive: Seagate 'exploring' possible new line of crypto-specific hard drives
by jim bell 01 Jun '21

01 Jun '21

TechRadar: Exclusive: Seagate 'exploring' possible new line of crypto-specific hard drives. https://www.techradar.com/news/exclusive-seagate-exploring-possible-new-lin…

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The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (spooks, feds, etc.)
by Greg Newby 01 Jun '21

01 Jun '21

John, On Tue, May 25, 2021 at 07:30:06PM -0400, John Young wrote: > Greg, these complaints seem to fit the disruptive practices of attackers described here: > > https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm > > Maybe coincidental but not the first to aim at messing with the list. Other lists have been wiped out with endless bitches, accusations, demand for attention. Of possible interest, here is an extract from a WWII-era field manual on sabotage. It highlights a variety of mechanisms to monkey-wrench organizations: Techniques for General Interference with Organizations and Production. Extracted from Project Gutenberg's eBook #26184 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184) SIMPLE SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL STRATEGIC SERVICES FIELD MANUAL No. 3 (11) General Interference with Organizations and Production (a) Organizations and Conferences (1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. (2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments. (3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible -- never less than five. (4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. (5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. (6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. (7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. (8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision -- raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon. (b) Managers and Supervisors (1) Demand written orders. (2) "Misunderstand" orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can. (3) Do everything possible to delay the delivery of orders. Even though parts of an order may be ready beforehand, don't deliver it until it is completely ready. (4) Don't order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown. (5) Order high-quality materials which are hard to get. If you don't get them argue about it. Warn that inferior materials will mean inferior work. (6) In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines. (7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye. (8) Make mistakes in routing so that parts and materials will be sent to the wrong place in the plant. (9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions. (10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work. (11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done. (12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files. (13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do. (14) Apply all regulations to the last letter. (c) Office Workers (1) Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses. (2) Prolong correspondence with government bureaus. (3) Misfile essential documents. (4) In making carbon copies, make one too few, so that an extra copying job will have to be done. (5) Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone. (6) Hold up mail until the next collection. (7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope. (d) Employees (1) Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job: use a light hammer instead of a heavy one, try to make a small wrench do when a big one is necessary, use little force where considerable force is needed, and so on. (2) Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can: when changing the material on which you are working, as you would on a lathe or punch, take needless time to do it. If you are cutting, shaping or doing other measured work, measure dimensions twice as often as you need to. When you go to the lavatory, spend a longer time there than is necessary. Forget tools so that you will have to go back after them. (3) Even if you understand the language, pretend not to understand instructions in a foreign tongue. (4) Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions. (5) Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment. Complain that these things are preventing you from doing your job right. (6) Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker. (7) Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms. (8) If possible, join or help organize a group for presenting employee problems to the management. See that the procedures adopted are as inconvenient as possible for the management, involving the presence of a large number of employees at each presentation, entailing more than one meeting for each grievance, bringing up problems which are largely imaginary, and so on. (9) Misroute materials. (10) Mix good parts with unusable scrap and rejected parts. (12) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion (a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned. (b) Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police. (c) Act stupid. (d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble. (e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations. (f) Complain against ersatz materials. (g) In public treat axis nationals or quislings coldly. (h) Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a caf�. (i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks. (j) Boycott all movies, entertainments, concerts, newspapers which are in any way connected with the quisling authorities. (k) Do not cooperate in salvage schemes.

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Population estimates from samples
by Greg Newby 01 Jun '21

01 Jun '21

Karl had been asking about how to estimate population statistics from a sample. I came across a fascinating approach to this, called bootstrapping or the bootstrap method. I learned about this an EdX data science course offered by Berkeley. The method is described in the course's free online textbook: https://inferentialthinking.com/chapters/13/2/Bootstrap.html This method makes some assumptions, including that your sample is reasonably large, and that the population distribution is approximately normal. The basic approach is to take your sample, and then randomly re-sample from the sample. This lets you build up a probability distribution of samples which, in turn, is representative of the population. The text includes some worked examples. The course uses Python (Jupyter notebooks) and a computational framework based on Pandas. The course sequence: https://www.edx.org/professional-certificate/berkeleyx-foundations-of-data-… It's the second course, "Inferential thinking through simulations," which introduces and builds on the bootstrap concept. Lots of the materials are free - including the computational framework and examples. I'm not sure whether you can audit the (self-paced) course for free. I found the bootstrap method to be very interesting. It is not something that came up in my many grad and undergrad statistics courses or other research methods (maybe it emerged since I was a university student). I hope this helps. Greg

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