July 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

My blog post on FOIAs, executive function, Alan Turing, avoiding propaganda
by Douglas Lucas 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

Hi cypherpunks email list, Y'all might value my new blog post (I've been blogging weekly this year). It uses as its point of departure how I've been catching up on my nagging pile of unattended FOIAs this past week — especially streamlining my processes for keeping track of them with spreadsheets — to discuss the psychology concept of executive function, applying Alan Turing's invention of software programming to mental health recovery and avoiding spy agency propaganda. The post ends with news blasts for Nigeria, Camp Rhonda in Dallas, and Rohingya bodybuilder Noor Kabir. I'm curious what y'all think, though I imagine sending this email will return a bunch of kooky responses from eccentric cypherpunks, which at least will provide me smiles. That's kind of the point of me posting this here... Anyway, this latest entry to my blog is at: https://douglaslucas.com/blog/2021/06/13/foias-executive-function/ And for those who retweet stuff: https://twitter.com/DouglasLucas/status/1404371710447476738 Happy not dying yet, Doug

6 14

Cryptocurrency: Energy - The True and Necessary Cost of Freedom vs Servitude
by grarpamp 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

The Bitcoin Energy Debate Is One Of Freedom Versus Servitude https://bombthrower.com/articles/the-bitcoin-energy-debate-is-one-of-freedo… https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/cryptocurrencies-financial-inclusion… https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/bitcoin-will-save-our-earth https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-hidden-costs-of-the-petrodollar https://www.coindesk.com/the-last-word-on-bitcoins-energy-consumption https://twitter.com/spinte8/status/1407258675358715907 https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ https://bombthrower.com/articles/the-jackpot-chronicles-scenario-4-atlas-sh… https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/sustainability/sustainability-12-08782/ar… https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/07/02/nolte-sociopaths-time-magazi… https://time.com/6077220/air-conditioning-bad-for-planet-how-to-fix/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-10/why-we-always-fight-over… https://bombthrower.com/articles/drastic-climate-action-needed-now-lets-ban… If you’re arguing against Bitcoin, then you’re in favour of serfdom In the most recent edition The Crypto Capitalist Letter I cited Elizabeth Warren’s comments in a senate banking committee meeting where she said “Digital currency from central banks has great promise. Legitimate digital public money could help drive out bogus digital private money, bogus crypto currencies” My remarks were that as a creature of the state she has it exactly backwards. This is predictable. For years I’ve been saying that the most oft-used criticisms against Bitcoin (backed by nothing, ponzi and tulipmania) were more accurate descriptions of the US dollar, social security, and meme stonks, in that order. In TCC we spend a lot of time thinking about the coming bifurcation in digital money: how Central Bank Digital Currencies will be the rails for things like UBI and welfare dependency while crypto currencies will be actual stores of wealth and capital formation. If there was one distinctive feature that would enable one to tell the difference between a “bogus” digital currency and a real one, it would be this: If you can hold your private keys, it’s real. If you can’t, it’s bogus. Precisely the opposite of how Warren is spinning it. The exact phrase I used in this month’s issue was : “The era of private, cryptographically secured money is here, and there’s not a damn thing any bureaucrat, any politician or any nation state can do about it.” That particular phrase “private, cryptographically secured money” is important. If you do not fully understand the implications of that and you unwittingly accept establishment arguments against Bitcoin, then you are tacitly ceding authority over your entire life, every transaction, every decision, every interaction with the world at large, to The State. Warren also piled onto the energy argument, which seems to be the latest unified front against the upstart non-state currency: “Cryptocurrency has created opportunities to scam investors, assist criminals and worsen the climate crisis” The energy argument fails on two fronts There are two distinct rebuttals to this issue. One is by putting Bitcoin energy usage into perspective and showing how the benefits justify the costs. (Even the World Economic Forum recently published a remarkably clueful paper saying that the arguments against Bitcoin were mainly FUD and that the energy usage was worth it given the benefits). The total electrical usage of all Bitcoin mining is approximately 110 TWh (Terra Watt hours) per year. It is estimated that as much as 20% of all electrical energy produced is wasted. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) puts it even higher, at 34%. The total electrical energy usage of the world in 2018 was around 22,000 TWh and 20% of that would have been 4,400 TWh (at the higher EIA figure it would be 7,480). Seen in that context, Bitcoin mining uses somewhere between 2.5% and 1.4% of all wasted electrical energy. It’s been written up by others how Bitcoin by its nature can be moved toward sources of energy waste and thus covert otherwise lost energy into real economic value. Great American Mining is already doing it (and one of the companies we hold in our Crypto Capitalist Portfolio is in a joint venture with them). Another example of providing context is when people like Alex Gladstein document how the US military empire is really a support structure for the US dollar, and compared to that, Bitcoin has a smaller carbon footprint and causes a lot less damage. Bitcoin is not actively conducting drone assassinations in multiple foreign countries. The petrodollar is. The other approach to the energy usage criticism by people like Nic Carter is the categorical rejection that any Bitcoiner is under any obligation to explain or justify their energy usage. If Bitcoin and cryptos have to rationalize their energy footprint, then that follows for everything. From “Keeping Up with The Kardashians” to NASA, can anybody truly rationalize their energy expenditure over the supposed conservational benefits of that activity not occurring? Energy as Authority It’s this attack on individual rights to use private, cryptographically secured money that I want to focus on in particular because to even accept that Bitcoin energy argument as valid, you are tacitly accepting that some authority other than you has the ultimate verdict over all energy usage including your own. Isn’t watching (or being) the Kardashians an exercise in self-absorption and triviality that glamorizes wealth inequality? Should NASA really be concerning itself with space when we have so much social justice to undertake here on Earth? We only have one Earth. Don’t those rockets use a lot of fuel and deplete the ozone layer? There are already serious academics suggesting that we should genetically engineer humans to be less harmful to the environment. Here is a bioethicist and NYU professor in a 2016 symposium making the case for genetically engineering humans so that they are born allergic to red meat and grow up to be on average 12 cubic centimeters smaller. For climate. In 2015 the UN adopted 17 sustainable development goals for working toward Agenda 2030. On the surface, these goals appear laudable and uncontroversial. They include objectives such as No Poverty (#1), Zero Hunger (#2), Gender Equality and Clean Water for All (#5 & 6), who isn’t in favour of any of these things? If you’re running the list you would almost gloss over SDG-12: Responsible Consumption and Production, because “By 2050, the equivalent of almost three planets could be required to sustain current lifestyles” You see where this is going. I’ve said it before, all this talk about Great Resets, The New Normal and Building Back Better is about getting the masses to ratchet down their lifestyles so that the managerial elites and experts can keep running the show (and maintaining theirs). Standards of living are all about energy inputs. As people and communities become more prosperous, their per-capita energy usage rises. The official canon of the national and supra-national elites is that this has to stop. Never mind that history is the story of humanity achieving exponentially higher productivity gains and energy efficiencies, never mind that the world was already on a trajectory to achieve many of the SDGs already without overbearing government intervention (see Ana and Hans Roslings’ “Factfulness” or Matt Ridley’s “The Rational Optimist”) All that matters is that the experts, the same technocratic class that brought you double masks, double vaccines and two years of lockdowns, have decided that this is the way things have to go. Incidentally, the COVID pandemic (which was arguably brought about by the very experts who were purportedly trying to prevent one) is the perfect opportunity to fast track new policies toward these Sustainable Development Goals. Make no mistake, the same climate technocrats who are saying Bitcoin’s energy footprint isn’t justified are already thinking in terms of a totalitarian system of energy and carbon rationing based on purported benefits of any given activity. If you think I’m exaggerating the extent to which the coming “resource based economy” model will subordinate your day-to-day activities and life choices to some greater good narrative, take a look at this recent research paper from multi disciplinary Sustainability institute about the cognitive dissonance and anxiety “PEBEXs” (Pro-environmental Behaviour Experts”) have to struggle with because their aspirational climate ideology clashes with the demands of everyday life. These are the people who’s job it is to advance policy and advocate for everybody else ratcheting down their consumption patterns (SDG-12, basically). “A practical behavior applied by participants to feel better about their consumption is to minimize it. These PEBEXs question their private and job-related consumption to acknowledge that they (and others) are better off with less. These narratives also contain social criticisms of materialism, perceived as a social norm of the Western world” (emphasis added) One of the tensions PEBEXs experience is the seeming futility of “engag[ing] in individual sustainable practices, to avoid a suboptimal allocation of their resources”, because at the individual level, change is insignificant “I don’t believe that much in individuals deciding to do things different. I want more the structures to be changed. I don’t know if I want to change people’s behavior, I want to change the society. So that we consume less energy. That is two different things for me.” (Emphasis added) For a fairly short quote, there’s a lot in there, including: the mindset that society should be restructured to accommodate these people’s feelings. The idea that the entire climate alarmist narrative is not settled science (see Steven E. Koonin’s “Unsettled”, or Michael Shellenbergers’s “Apocalypse Never” for example) is not even imaginable to them. the compartmentalization between working for a radical structural change to society is different than ordering people’s lives on an individual level. Very similar to the progressive mindset of cost-free entitlements. Second-order effects are ignored, all policy objectives can be achieved by wishing for them to be true. that change at an individual level is meaningless or insignificant. Again, telling. Because the overall policy is collectivist and for many of these people, individualism is a mental disorder. Suffice it to quote Samuel Konkin’s “Liberty cannot be achieved en masse. It can only happen individual by individual”) As if to drive the entire point home for me, no sooner had I posted this when I came across a “think piece” from Time Magazine lecturing us on air conditioning: The upshot is that air conditioning is bad for the environment and problematic, thus, it must me ‘re-imagined’ I guess…: The troubled history of air-conditioning suggests not that we chuck it entirely but that we focus on public cooling, on public comfort, rather than individual cooling, on individual comfort. Ensuring that the most vulnerable among the planet’s human inhabitants can keep cool through better access to public cooling centers, shade-giving trees, safe green spaces, water infrastructure to cool, and smart design will not only enrich our cities overall, it will lower the temperature for everyone. It’s far more efficient this way. To do so, we’ll have to re-orient ourselves to the meaning of air-conditioning. And to comfort. Privatized air-conditioning survived the ozone crisis, but its power to separate—by class, by race, by nation, by ability—has survived, too. Comfort for some comes at the expense of the life on this planet. It’s time we become more comfortable with discomfort. Our survival may depend on it.“ Ok. That’s not hyperbolic at all. And yet again we see that same diminution of individual agency and autonomy in favour of the collective. Private is bad. Public is good. I’m sure the offices at Time have the a/c switched off as do the staff remote working from home. If they don’t, then whoever wrote this may be experiencing the same anxiety as the aforementioned PEBEXs. This kind of sanctimonious shrieking doesn’t take into account that pretty well everything being made in industrial society today is becoming more energy efficient over time. It doesn’t take into account that four times as much energy is spent on heat than on air conditioning. Or that without widespread private air conditioning, a lot of people would actually die, especially among the elderly and medically at-risk. The idea to redesign public spaces to afford more cooling areas aren’t bad ideas, but the real solution to addressing the disparities in underdeveloped communities is to increase economic prosperity for the citizens who inhabit them. One way to do that could happen if they had access to some kind of private cryptographically secured money, whose purchasing power increases over time… or something. Just a thought. But that would be better than marshalling them into communal herds of dependency (which is basically what the ultimate aspiration is for everyone except the billionaires and elites zipping around the world on private jets to climate conferences). Bitcoin today. Cars tomorrow. Then hamburgers. Heated bathroom floors Air conditioning after that. Second homes. Cottages. Excessive wardrobes. Rationing shoes. Vacations. If you accept that anybody has the moral authority to tell you what you can and can’t do with your own wealth and how you consume energy, then you are submitting to their judgement on every aspect of your energy consumption, and thus, your entire life. What people don’t realize is that there is an overarching framework that already mediates energy usage and consumption, one that allocates resources toward optimal outcomes. This already exists (or at least it used to), it’s called free markets that are driven by economic tradeoffs.

1 0

US war crimes (david barrett's crimes)
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-on-obamas-presi… "Obama’s embrace and vast expansion of drone strikes against militants and terrorists will be an enduring foreign policy legacy. Whereas President George W. Bush authorized approximately 50 drone strikes that killed 296 terrorists and 195 civilians in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, Obama has authorized 506 strikes that have killed 3,040 terrorists and 391 civilians." So it's a matter of public record that non human trash obomba murdered '391 civilians'. In reality the '3040 terrorists' were innocent victims too. And in even more reality the real numbers are way higher. At any rate, it's basic fact of reality that the so called 'presidents of the US' are guilty of mass murder. And so is anyone defending the US govt, like barrett. Non human garbage like barrett needs killing.

2 7

[ot][spam][wrong][spam] impossible pgp keys
by Karl 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

Spamming the list alleviates my need to disrepute myself, almost no matter what I say! I was daydreaming recently of exchanging pgp-signed messages with grarpamp. I'm always wondering how to get myself a pgp key, my brain is so tired of wondering it. Do you think grarpamp has a public key? They seem like they'd know how to use one if they did. Like me, grarpamp demonstrates knowledge, use, and skills of things like privacy technology, but I don't receive many messages from them actually helping people use them. Not many links to tools, no signatures on messages, etc etc. Grarpamp also links to youtube a lot which could indicate they could have little free time for such things, obviously I have no way of knowing for sure. To exchange proper signed or possibly encrypted communications with grarpamp, I would need four things. - to have a private key myself - to have grarpamp's public key - to have a way of exchanging messages that got delivered - to have a way of verifying key fingerprints The first one is the hardest. But the second item is also very hard! Sometimes I imagine that I'm in some kind of internet bubble, and that's why I see so few message signatures. There is a lot of possible indication of this. But even if it's true, it matches my own experience that people would be actually not using private keys, too. It's hard to tell which. It's also possible there are message signatures in those email headers. I usually zone out and forget that that's possible. I don't think grarpamp is signing their emails. But I don't know. Maybe punk is even signing their emails. I don't know! How could we set up a way to exchange keys with random people on the internet we've never met and never really chat with? How could I do this? Maybe I could get them a physical object. That would help a lot. Or I could meet them in some kind of online network that has more cryptographic guarantees. Regardless, if I'm going to be paranoid that everything on my internet could possibly be faked, _and_ that my computer[s] is/are participating in that, I'm going to need a private reasonably secure system to do the cryptography on. Nowadays, everyone I talk to about such things brushes them off, as if the swathes of international system compromises continuously going on indicate that we should blindly trust technology to make things okay. I seriously have this experience! Some time ago I mentioned message signatures to punk on-list and received an apparent reply asking if I was "worried the list administrator was changing our emails" (that is an incredibly untrustworthy reply, and not where I would expect the change to happen, but it could very well have been made up by an actor between us). I actually asked Greg about message signatures. Greg said they didn't use pgp. I asked if they had a lot of trust for networks, relating having participated in a mitm on somebody else once myself, and Greg just didn't reply. I figured the exchange was just part of the whole mitm shenanigans. Now, it's been a number of years since pgp happened. Maybe there is something new now. Some other way to have end-to-end encryption. Maybe that's why greg replied that way. Wouldn't the cypherpunky thing to do to have been to introduce me to it, though? Well, the political environment has changed a lot ... Now, it's pretty obvious that slavery is involved, because that's what followed me around everywhere, and I tested this with coderman. But I'm not so confident that that history, of coderman signing their messages, stopping signing when I replied to one unsigned, and then signing again when I wondered if they were a victim of slavery, is staying on this server. Who knows! Anyway, the only person who can't say they are a slave who needs to be freed, is somebody who _is_ one, in _most_ situations.

1 0

david barrett is a cheerleader for murder and torture
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

julian assange and bradley manning have been persecuted and tortured by david barrett's government because they published (more) evidence of US summary execution of innocent people. https://www.nytimes.com/video/multimedia/1248069533084/collateral-murder.ht… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_murder "video shows the crew firing on a group of men and killing several of them, then laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians, including two Reuters journalists."

2 5

Bloomberg: Can a Dark Market Be a Geopolitical Force? Watch Russia's Hydra
by jim bell 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

Bloomberg: Can a Dark Market Be a Geopolitical Force? Watch Russia's Hydra. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-01/can-a-dark-market-be-…

2 1

Apps with 5.8 million Google Play downloads stole users’ Facebook passwords – Ars Technica
by jim bell 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/google-boots-google-play-apps-for-s…

1 0

[spam][wrong] old news and fake news
by Karl 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

I'm sure anyone who's been on this list for a long time has been exposed to situations being covered up in the news. News are businesses, need to keep themselves alive, and what people pay for, and the general climate of doing business, influences what they publish. In Occupy, it became blindingly obvious that some things didn't reach the news. This was so obvious that we had a number of groups across the country and the world organising around providing alternative news. In Occupy there were newsworthy stories streaming through the camps densely, but all the news would seem to report was that we were a bunch of illegal protesters who didn't seem to know what they were protesting. They would interview drunks and ignore our multiple daily open-to-the-public meetings. Then Trump happened. He talked about fake news. He hurt people. I heard he had it hard as a kid and learned to rise to the top. Trump was an obvious, ridiculous cover-up, that is still begging for its own people to realise it and save it. His platform was high-tech news. I would see him giving different political platforms to different social groups, micro-managing the local media. It's strange to have someone call the mainstream media fake news, when every channel in the mainstream media has them on it. I was in Vermont during the primaries, bernie senders' state. I quite literally flipped every channel, and none of them had bernie on it. I tried this for weeks. The best I could find was quotes of bernie repeated by trump in order to disrepute him. I honestly to this day have never heard Bernie Sanders speak. It's hard to judge who to vote for in such a situation. I voted a third party like most hopeful jaded people do. I'm sure others had different experiences. But maybe I'm not sure. Did anyone see bernie sanders say anything on television during the primaries? Anyway. Trump's people kept saying to use these other well-financed outlets instead of the fake mainstream ones, which is ridiculous. I can guess that they didn't understand how few people were able to act on the fake news expression. Occupy was big, but it was also heavily and overtly disrupted, and its disruption then covered up. The people who did Occupy are homeless and/or doing other things. I'm sad to report that many have gotten business jobs to stay safe. Occupy was not some huge moneybags investor -- it was the people of the streets, the churches, and various other activist efforts working together across the world. We don't know how to spawn a media effort. We got lucky, and worked together like you can't imagine, surviving solely off donations by visitors, for months and months. But now everybody sees. Everybody in the world saw trump's group splat the world with how ridiculous the political power is. It's obvious trump knows how ridiculous it is, but now everyone seems to have believed his malarky, which is terrifying. And a lot of people got hurt. Many of them people Occupy was trying to protect from existing harm. Oh, and we have AI now, can anybody actually use it? Or is it just like a scary mask on the wall? Biden now is gently pretending to be a normal stooge, not an exotic one. I'm sure both trump and biden pull their best strings to do what's right. It's hard to learn what those strings are when your media is telling you that everything is "evil", whatever that word means.

1 0

[ot][spam] Censorship is a Firing Squad Wall
by Karl 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

When you censor, the people you are censoring lose power, impact, communication, voice, influence. These people are less powerful than those guiding the censoring. This means they run into more suffering, and learn about more problems. Some of them get deep, deep into the problems. When censored, these people die, and the problems become unlearned of. When not censored, these people make an irritating stink, and people learn of some of the problems. Problems nobody could ever imagine. Problems that have learned to never be noticed except by their victims.

1 0

US war crimes (david barrett's crimes)
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 03 Jul '21

03 Jul '21

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/01/12/reflecting-on-obamas-presi… "Obama’s embrace and vast expansion of drone strikes against militants and terrorists will be an enduring foreign policy legacy. Whereas President George W. Bush authorized approximately 50 drone strikes that killed 296 terrorists and 195 civilians in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, Obama has authorized 506 strikes that have killed 3,040 terrorists and 391 civilians." So it's a matter of public record that non human trash obomba murdered '391 civilians'. In reality the '3040 terrorists' were innocent victims too. And in even more reality the real numbers are way higher. At any rate, it's basic fact of reality that the so called 'presidents of the US' are guilty of mass murder. And so is anyone defending the US govt, like barrett. Non human garbage like barrett needs killing.

2 1