July 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Reuters UK: British police seize record $408 million haul of cryptocurrency
by jim bell 13 Jul '21

13 Jul '21

Reuters UK: British police seize record $408 million haul of cryptocurrency. https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/british-police-seize-250-million-cryptocur…

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Enforcing encryption at scale - Facebook Engineering
by jim bell 13 Jul '21

13 Jul '21

https://engineering.fb.com/2021/07/12/security/enforcing-encryption/

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Startup hopes the world is ready to buy quantum processors – Ars Technica
by jim bell 13 Jul '21

13 Jul '21

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/dutch-startup-hopes-to-sell-people-…

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US Civilian Entities Using Military HW and Intel Against Americans to Grow and Enforce Totalitarian State
by grarpamp 13 Jul '21

13 Jul '21

Capitol Police To Use Military Surveillance Equipment In Role As 'Intelligence-Based Protective Agency' https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jul/10/capitol-police-use-army-su… https://asc.army.mil/web/portfolio-item/iews-pss-t-2/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/topics/persistent-surveillance-systems/ In response to the January 6 Capitol riot, US Capitol Police will begin employing military surveillance equipment used by the Army in what the Washington Times described as part of "sweeping security upgrades" as the force transforms into "an intelligence-based protective agency." Lockheed Martin hybrid PSSG airship (read more here) Upgrades will include eight 'Persistent Surveillance Systems Ground - Medium' (PSSG-M) units, which provide HD surveillance video and includes night vision. According to the Pentagon, it does not include facial recognition. "This technology will be integrated with existing USCP camera infrastructure, providing greater high definition surveillance capacity to meet steady-state mission requirements and help identify emerging threats," said the Pentagon. The technology allowed U.S. troops fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to monitor large areas 24/7 through extremely high-resolution cameras. Some privacy rights advocates have raised concern that Capitol Police are getting into the business of spying on Americans. In a wartime application, the persistent surveillance units were mounted on tethered blimps. The data could be stored, combined with sensor data from other platforms, and later referenced or rewound to track individuals or groups. The military could use the system to develop “pattern of life” analyses on suspected enemy combatants or intelligence targets in war zones. It could determine, for example, who was responsible for placing an improvised explosive device. -Washington Times According to a 2016 Government Accountability Office report, the Department of Homeland Security leased the same, or similar technology through the Department of Defense. Few details were provided to the Times about the new system - such as how and where it will be deployed, or whether collected data will be stored or disseminated - or whether it will be shared with other agencies. "Hopefully, you can understand it wouldn’t be smart of us tell the world all our capabilities," a Capitol Police official told the Times. The Pentagon says the Army will install the units and provide training to the Capitol Police to operate and maintain the system. Once installed, the Army won't have any role in operation.

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Cryptocurrency: WarOnCash, Cash Is Not Anonymous, You Are Being Tracked
by grarpamp 13 Jul '21

13 Jul '21

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwHdS1gCc6Q JetScan Cash Counter Fun video for all the retards who refuse to believe what is happening. That video is eight years old, global deployments of such tech predate that. It is now all networked, indexed, stored forever, bought, sold, shared, given, secreted, datamined, and used to fuck people. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/mail-isolation-con… Wake the fuck up. Fight back.

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Cryptocurrency: ESG, Hydropower, Digital Power for Freedom
by grarpamp 13 Jul '21

13 Jul '21

“Old money is not going to pick us up; it pushes us down. The digital rebellion is here. -- Spike Lee" "China’s Ban on Bitcoin Follows a Pattern Frequently Used by Beijing Since the End 2000s: Anything that promotes freedom is banned by the Chinese authorities." "It’s ok for Billionaires to go to space for no reason and burn a ton of rocket fuel but nooooo we can’t have any crypto mining going on cause you know the oceans are LITERALLY ON FIRE because of crypto mining" "This block was mined with a carbon negative power source -- Block 690688" https://omid-malekan.medium.com/the-esg-case-for-crypto-a663888c4223 The ESG Case For Crypto First, let’s state the obvious: Bitcoin mining uses a lot of electricity, so it’s bad for the environment. Anyone who claims otherwise is either a salesperson or a fool. Arguing that mining is good for the environment because it encourages investment in renewables is like arguing that smoking saves lives by driving cancer research. All of the energy comparisons to the traditional banking system are also foolish. There are various nuances to this debate, but none change the fact that Bitcoin has a significant carbon footprint. But so do a lot of things. Tellingly, none are as controversial. What’s the carbon footprint of people cranking the AC, ordering takeout and watching Netflix? Significant, but seldom debated. Every kind of human activity impacts the environment, and plenty of mundane activities use “more power than some countries” when measured in aggregate. Deciding which ones are worthwhile requires an objective cost-benefit analysis and comparison to similar activities. Bitcoin mining is rather unique, but for the sake of argument, let’s compare it to the US military. Like Bitcoin, the US military uses more energy than some countries. Also like Bitcoin, a big reason why is to secure the purchasing power of a currency. But unlike Bitcoin, the military does this in a roundabout way, protecting unsavory regimes who price their exports in dollars and dropping the occasional bomb. The relationship between money and power is almost as old as money itself, with those issuing the former often utilizing the latter to keep their currency on top. Bitcoin’s clever contribution is to make this previously implicit relationship explicit. People trust its coins because they require a lot of power to produce. The ESG case for crypto starts with the recognition that the power consumption of coins like Bitocin and Ether is a feature and not a bug, the most important component of a novel security mechanism that achieves something remarkable: a global monetary system that is independent of any corporation or government, and strictly opt-in. There are no exclusive legal tender laws, capital controls or naval fleets that force people to trust Bitcoin. And yet, hundreds of millions do, perhaps for that very reason. Crypto has no coercion. It uses transparency, math and economic incentives to build trust where it wouldn’t otherwise exist. Crypto is meritocratic. Anyone can do anything — from mining to using to saving — and lots of people all over the world do. Like Lady Justice herself, crypto is blind. It doesn’t care (or even know about) anyone’s nationality, race, age, gender or sexual orientation. It’s the first electronic payment system that is accessible to anyone anywhere, from undcoumented workers in Western countries to women in Islamists ones to dissidents fighting dictators. The environmental impact is therefore offset by the social benefits, a negative E in exchange for a positive S. That tradeoff is worth it, thanks to the increasingly tragic failures of the traditional monetary system. Not in terms of devaluation and inflation — though that may come later — but in terms of access. Over one and a half billion global unbanked, most of them poor, undocumented, minority and innocent. That last adjective is important, because the exclusionary nature of our existing financial system is no accident. It’s a direct consequence of a system built on a presumption of guilt. As proof, consider the simple fact that opening up a bank account is often more intrusive than having open-heart surgery. Your doctor doesn’t have to collect a bunch of legal documents and perform a background check before doing her job, but your banker does. Most industries operate on a presumption of innocence. They accept anyone as a customer until individual behavior or law enforcement gives them a reason not to. Banking works on the opposite principle. Everyone is a potential terrorist or money launderer until they prove otherwise. This presumption of guilt is a minor nuisance for the affluent, but an existential threat to the underprivileged. It’s one reason why poor neighborhoods feature more pseudo-financial services like check cashers and pawn chops than bank branches, even in rich countries. It’s also a contributor to the growing wealth gap. Those who have the least amount of money pay the highest fees, keeping them ensconced in poverty. It’s not that banks don’t want to serve these communities. It’s that so-called anti-money laundering (AML) know-your-client (KYC) & sanctions regulations make it too hard or too expensive for them to do so. Bitcoin itself may not be the solution to this problem, but the tokenized financial system that it represents can, because it’s built on a presumption of innocence. Unlike banks and Fintechs who have no choice but to rely on legal identity — the kind that 10 million undocumented workers in America don’t have — tokens rely on cryptographic identity. Math doesn’t discriminate, so anyone who wants to access a blockchain network — to transfer Bitcoins, dollars or any other store of value — is able to. It goes without saying that the vast majority won’t be doing anything illegal. They’ll order goods online or send money back home, without having to pay exorbitant fees. Here the crypto critics chime in with the now-cliched canard about illicit use. They claim that a financial system as open to undcoumented Mexicans as it is to affluent Americans will be rife with criminal activity. The inherent racism and classism of this argument aside, it fails a basic smell test. It would be one thing if the existing financial system, for all of its exclusionary tendencies, actually prevented crime. But the numbers indicate otherwise. According to the World Economic Forum, an estimated 2 to 5 percent of global GDP — some two trillion dollars per year — is laundered through the banking system. There is $30b a year in credit card fraud, and according to acclaimed economist Kenneth Rogoff, up to a third of all hundred dollar bills are used in illegal activity. The most reliable estimate for the amount of Bitcoins used in illicit activity in 2020 — as published by Chainalysis, the leading government contractor in this domain — is only ten billion dollars, equal to the amount of money-laundering related fines global banks paid in the same period. If the existing approach was remotely successful at keeping out the bad guys, then we could have a debate about whether the social costs were worth it. But guilty until proven innocent has failed on both fronts, so it’s time for a new approach, one that shifts the focus from keeping out bad actors to isolating bad money — know your token as opposed to know your client. Here the transparency and immutability of blockchain networks come in handy. Unlike duffel bags full of cash or structured wire transfers, tokens leave a perfect audit trail, one that is increasingly used to solve crimes. source: Chainalysis The social benefits of crypto don’t end there. Tempting as it might be to shift the ESG debate away from speculative bitcoin to less power hungry platforms or central bank digital currencies, we should not shortchange what Bitcoin itself has achieved, which is to appreciate significantly. Skeptics love to complain about its volatility, despite the fact that it has always resolved to the upside. This critique can even be heard on Wall Street, where lots of things — including credit default swaps, Tesla stock and negatively priced oil futures — are also volatile. The inconsistency might have something to do with who has benefited. Bitcoin has made a lot of poor, foreign, minority and young people rich, even when factoring in the recent decline. This is in stark contrast to other high flying investments such as venture capital, private equity or real estate, access to which is restricted. Before Bitcoin, a majority of people had no access to the majority of assets — a socioeconomic failure so astonishing that it’s worth repeating: poor people don’t get to invest in most things, due to a nasty combination of misguided laws, high minimum entry prices, lack of infrastructure in poor countries and KYC regulations in rich ones. According to the FDIC, up to a third of all African Americans remain underbanked, and people who have a hard time getting bank accounts have an even harder time opening brokerage ones. But anyone could have bought bitcoin at any time, and even a few dollars invested five years ago would be worth thousands today. But that’s not how crypto investing is presented. Tellingly, the only time when investment luminaries like Warren Buffet or central bankers like Neel Kashkari comment on the investment potential of Bitcoin is to criticize it — “rat poison squared” according to Buffett and “burning garbage” per Kashkari. Their ignorance of what Bitcoin has achieved for ordinary people brings us to the final ESG argument for crypto, its superior governance. Crypto governance is egalitarian. Anyone can contribute, and lots of people all over the world do, by holding tokens, validating transactions, hosting nodes or submitting code. Crypto governance is also meritocratic. There are no politically appointed positions, entrenched incumbents or captured regulators. Some of the most important participants are pseudonymous, because the community doesn’t care where someone comes from or what school they attended. All that matters is their contribution, the ultimate embodiment of Emerson’s “doing well as a result of doing good.” This is in stark contrast to traditional governance, where power is usually shared by a small group of people who attend the same schools, work at the same companies and exist in the same power circles. No wonder then that Mr. Kashkari (Republican, Wharton MBA, former Goldman banker) and Mr Buffett (Democrat, Wharton MBA, former Goldman shareholder) share a disdain for crypto. If traditional governance was more like crypto governance, then Mr. Kahkari, chief architect of the U.S. government’s TARP program, would have never been able to engineer the taxpayer funded bailouts that disproportionately benefited Warren Buffet’s investment portfolio, almost half of which was in financial stocks at the dawn of the 2008 crisis. Despite his poor judgement at that time, Mr. Buffett is now only richer for the experience. The countless people who lost their home or their job in the same crisis are not. Perhaps more than anything, the ESG case for crypto begins and ends with what it isn’t, which is the old way of doing things. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Mechanicville-hydro-plant-gets-new-… New York Hydro Power Plant Mines Bitcoin Because More Profitable Than Selling Electricity To Grid This year, some of the hottest trends in the crypto industry have been bitcoin adoption and environmental, social, and governance factors into crypto mining. Tesla CEO Elon Musk pushed bitcoin's environmental concerns into the forefront, calling for "renewable energy" to be used for mining instead of fossil fuels. It's no secret that bitcoin mining takes a massive amount of electricity. It's estimated that energy consumption exceeds the power consumption of countries like the Netherlands and the UAE. With the push towards ESG-Friendly bitcoin mining operations, there's one historic hydroelectric plant near Albany, New York, using power generated from its massive water turbines to mine crypto. "We think this is the oldest renewable energy facility in the world that's still running," Albany Engineering Corp. CEO Jim Besha told the Times Union. He said the plant "could actually make more money with bitcoin than selling the electricity to National Grid. Albany Engineering Corp. receives around 3 cents per kilowatt-hour when it sells energy to National Grid. Mining bitcoin makes about three times the amount of money, Besha said. "It's the best (type of bitcoin mining) because we're using renewable energy," Besha said. "We're just doing it on the side, experimenting with it. We're buying used servers." Each week Besha converts thousandths of a bitcoin into fiat rather than 'HODL' because he's worried about crypto volatility. The hydroplant was constructed in 1897 and is getting new life amid China's crackdown on miners, resulting in the hash rate —the computational power available to mine the cryptocurrency, reflecting the efficiency of the bitcoin blockchain network, plunging since mid-May. The only issue Besha has to worry about is a bill that would ban cryptocurrency mining in New York.

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starlink garbage
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 12 Jul '21

12 Jul '21

The distance between ground radios and the satellites is ~500km, which isn't exactly close. So the ground radios need in excess of 100w to transmit to the satellite. Likewise the satelite must be using 100w per user or perhaps substantially more because the downlink is faster. The satellites orbit the earth 10 or 15 times per day or something like that. So half the time they don't see the sun. My half educated guess is that power consuption is one of the factors that limits the number of users per satellite. There probably are other factors. At any rate, the fact that the starlink mafia wants to use an insane number of satellites kinda suggests that they need them for the system to 'work as advertised' Another funny fact is that the satellites last a few years and then they are BURNT. They are very expensive pieces of equipment that are literally burnt at a stupidly fast rate. But hey, the musk non human turd and accomplices are such green envirofascists! Yet another giveaway of the scam is that technofascist US GOVT agents like jim bell and 'grarpamp' are promoting starlink as a weapon to be used by the US criminals against cuba, china, iran and other places that resist being directly ruled by US turds.

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Re: [liberationtech] Advice on secure phones
by grarpamp 12 Jul '21

12 Jul '21

> I am tired of these corporations telling us what we can and what we > can't do with the hardware we bought. People accepted that when they bought it. That's free market. It is peoples personal responsibility that if they don't like a product or company, then don't patronize them, don't pay support buy signup praise whatever them, and educate others on why they might not wish to patronize either, and to go startup creating the products and terms you do want instead. > I am tired of these corporations telling us what we can and what we can't do > So endlessly tired. > I'm also trying to liberate > we really need politicians and others "in power" to DO SOMETHING. People are tired because they've discovered that they have wasted their entire lives abdicating themselves and their own rights and power by choosing to keep putting politicians and companies and religion and force in power over them and then attempting to beg on their knees before such intoxicated rulers to do something. That clearly does not work, has never worked in history, and there is no iteration that will ever work in the future. So stop doing that, literally stop doing that, try something completely new instead. For a so called "Liberation" list, it's utterly astounding that so few on it know the first thing what achieving a state of liberation is, Free Markets, Voluntaryism, Anarchism, Libertarian, NAP, etc. In fact, they actively fight to keep themselves oppressed by constantly fighting and censoring the messengers and messages of Freedom. Then they complain that they're tired of not being free. Go figure. Stop begging to putting yourselves under the boot of other people and GovCorpReligion. Become free beautiful human beings.

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1984: Exposed - BigTech FakeNews and Intel Agencies Annual Sun Valley Conference Bilderberg MOCKINGBIRD COINTELPRO Bohemian Allen
by grarpamp 12 Jul '21

12 Jul '21

Exposed - BigTech FakeNews and Intel Agencies Annual Sun Valley Conference Bilderberg MOCKINGBIRD COINTELPRO Bohemian Allen https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/07/top-secret-meeting-media-kingpins-… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ1kbam7vlk SunValley Censor Prop and Spy Conf w Mark Dice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_&_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Mockingbird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove Wake up you idiots... Wake The Fuck Up! Top Secret Meeting of Mainstream Media, Big Tech, and Intelligence Heads Is Taking Place This Week In Idaho This week top-secret meetings are taking place between the top communications firms in the US. Big Tech, Mainstream Media (Big Media), and the intelligence community are gathering to strategize on how to consolidate their power over the information being force-fed to the American people. Mark Dice shares the following: Every time people talk about the Mainstream media conglomerates secretly collaborating with each other. Visions of smoke-filled rooms and shadowy figures wearing expensive suits sitting around a table come to mind. Well, this may be an exaggerated expectation at the behind-the-scenes look at the issue, but it isn’t all that far from the truth. Every July since 1983 a small group of media moguls, tech titans, investors, politicians, and intelligence agency insiders, all gather in the small town of Sun Valley, Idaho, for a week of meetings to develop the consensus regarding policies for Mainstream media, social media, and emerging communications technology. It’s basically like the Bilderberg meeting for media and since tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and YouTube have become major players in the media industry, they all come together each year in Sun Valley trying to make sure no emerging platforms can threaten their power… Mark is one of the great voices on YouTube that was targeted and censored since 2016. He was too effective. The above video is an example of his fabulous work. Americans need to break free of these information-controlling entities. New media is the answer. Individuals like Mark and sites like The Gateway Pundit are flourishing as Americans want the truth.

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Chip shortage sees smugglers cling-filming CPUs to their bodies, over $4M of parts seized | PC Gamer
by jim bell 11 Jul '21

11 Jul '21

https://www.pcgamer.com/chip-shortage-sees-people-cling-filming-cpus-to-the…

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