August 2021 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

[ot][crazy][draft] Fractured
by Karl 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

Bobby jacks into the digital mindwaves. It's breakfast. They used to have nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar for breakfast. That was decades ago. They flip their tongue a little to experience the doses of nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and sugar they expect and resumed their work designing a new form of interplanetary travel based on propulsion systems that redesigned themselves for nearby resources. They had a potted plant in their window with a magical spirit. The magical spirit of their potted plant watched them as they sat at their breakfast table with their muscles twitching, darting their eyes and fingers around the empty space in front of them as they engaged an augmented reality. The magical spirit of the potted plant didn't just watch them. She was also watching the birds wake up and celebrate the morning outdoors, the magical spirits of the wind and rain race their fronts of pressure and humidity, a number of communities of insects, bacteria, and fungus she was in symbiosis with, and also Bobby's pet dog, Hypercookie, who was playing with a robot in the other room. [I ran into a cognitive issue here and wrote the issue down: Bobby was debugging an error in his model for environments needing new engine designs. It kept failing in I'm trying to write that the model is for choosing the general patterns for newly created designs based on patterns of newly encountered environments. My brain is refusing to simplify this expression for me. In the story, they have already finished the nn-based hyperculture that businesses are planning. The bug was going to be with a subset of these pattern groups, which Bobby had already broken into a roughly finite set. It was going to pick sets that were clearly wrong, often avoiding a subset of the correct sets in a wieghted way, and it was going to be due to a training error that stemmed from the architecture of the model combined with randomness in the data. He would go in and resolve the error by understanding the cause and manually redirecting the impact of the training data. This was going to be all simple and concise and only partly described. ][why doesn't he use an ai that understands the issue?][the space of meaning here is outside the distribution of commonly available nn models for him, and it would fix it wrong.] [what are your thoughts on changing how nn models are so that they can handle issues like this?] [it feels like something doesn't want that to happen, that it fears somebody would use the information, even accidentally, to do something horrible. but. I'll try to think on it a little. ...] [no it's ok you don't have to] [well I think about this a lot I just have to remember it. Ummm .... nn models seem to function really slowly. I might consider training a hierarchy of them around choosing architectures and mapping learning rates to individual weights, as a research focus. Assuming that then made fast training, I might make a second one around designing architectural information for new environments. I guess I'm expecting this to eventually learn it needs logical reasons and write code / design architectures around investigating the rules that cause things and using those directly. I think there's a lot of existing research around that, maybe i'd even make it the core and just use nn models to handle fluffy stuff quickly? fluffy being things where guessing based on lots of things less complex than reality is helpful, I guess. Just ideas. No real experience here. I dunno if that is helpful or ridicuous, don't really know how to tell]

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Zambia election Internet blocking.
by jim bell 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-47639452?ns_mchannel=social&ns_s…

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BBC News: Apple regrets confusion over 'iPhone scanning'
by jim bell 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

Apple regrets confusion over 'iPhone scanning' - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58206543

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Snowden eviscerates Apple's plan to spy on your photos.
by jim bell 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

Snowden EVISCERATES Apple's Plan to Spy on Your Photos | | | | | | | | | | | Snowden EVISCERATES Apple's Plan to Spy on Your Photos | | | Jim Bell's comment: My vague understanding is that there was a time, at least until 1990 or so, in which a person could shoot 'nakey-pictures' of the kids around a swimming pool, and take them to a developer (they had those, then!!! Remember Fotomat?), and not think twice about the consequences...because there wouldn't BE any 'consequences'. (I never did that, myself...). But one of the things I think we should fear is a company like Apple beginning to act like a 'censor-in-your-smartphone'. I also recently speculated that there might appear a new form of malware, which had the function of downloading some child-porn, decrypting it, and erasing itself after anonymously reporting the identity of the user of the smartphone. Most people wouldn't even notice this, and current anti-malware software probably wouldn't detect this. Jim Bell

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Sending encrypted payload with a dumb phone as MMS
by Stefan Claas 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

Hi all, here is a little proposal, some of you may like. Let's assume Alice travels a lot and she wants to send Bob encrypted MMS messages, instead of regular email. First she writes her message, on an offline usage Notebook, and then pads it to a large size, so that she always has the same message size. https://github.com/sac001/pad Once done, she encrypts the message(s) with her favorite encryption tool and then she runs it through this program: https://github.com/jweyrich/imgify Additionally she can use a steganographic tool to hide the noise image into another image. https://github.com/umahmood/steg Finally she plugs in her dumb phone, with a USB port, to her offline usage only Notebook and copies the image to the phone and inserts the image into her MMS message. P.S. The advantage of this procedure should be that Alice's dumb phone is more protected against Government Trojans for smartphones, with a crypto messenger. Hope you like! Regards Stefan

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Truth idea
by Karl 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

I came up with this phrase, but I don't know how to think about it to judge it more: "There is a clear story about what is going on, but it is not safe to share this story."

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Antivax bitches leave
by professor rat 14 Aug '21

14 Aug '21

professor rat - about 2 hours ago hakan_geijer - 2h If you think you should be able to kick nazis and abusers out of your community, then it absolutely makes sense to also kick out anti vaxx people because in the last 18 months, more people have been seriously harmed and killed by covid than the other two combined. https://joindiaspora.com/stream

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Two cheers for capitalism
by professor rat 13 Aug '21

13 Aug '21

Its good we may now have some sensible conversations about global political economy since crypto-anarchist infrastructure is taking over the planet and there will be a lot of natural curiosity about where it came from. By " CYPHERPUNK 2027 " I'd like to see all libertarian and Marxist viewpoints entirely discredited and eliminated from all public discourse. Oh, yes, and that bastard son of theirs called ' Libertarian Marxism " ( or ' National Bolshevism ' ) There are only a couple of Marxists lurking here and possibly four or five Austro-Libertarians. Easy to clean house within four or five years. Forwards!

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Two cheers for capitalism
by professor rat 13 Aug '21

13 Aug '21

Braudel argued that capitalists have typically been monopolists and not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets, thus diverging from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel's view, the state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition, as it is usually portrayed. He asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel

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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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