December 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

SEMICH accused of flooding social media with spam to crowd out protest news
by professor rat 05 Dec '22

05 Dec '22

I can sum up the article for you, Karl. It says you're disrupting us here with your bad-faith and bullshit. The longer you do that the greater your punishment. As a field-guide take a few minutes to see what happened to this perceived enemy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Ilan_Halimi Reposts not guides to killing Karl Semich slowly. Not.

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Cryptocurrency: CashRain Community Reward Protocol On BCH
by grarpamp 05 Dec '22

05 Dec '22

https://cashrain.com/ Cash Rain: A Bitcoin Cash platform to Rain BCH on Various Communities https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDbhjcbE7DI CashRain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJt3VnQ4DWI CashRain

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SEMICH accused of flooding social media with spam to crowd out protest news
by professor rat 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

Sorry - China accused of flooding social media with spam to crowd out protest news https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/04/china-accused-of-flooding-soc… Reposts not hostile spam from anarchist hating dipshit, Karl Semich

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Cryptocurrency: Cyprus Fintech Summit 2022, HoneyBadger Still Don't Care
by grarpamp 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

Panel videos likely online, backdoor deals likely not... Real cryptocurrency like honeybadger, doesn't give a fuck about backdoor deals, Corps, Govts, Banks, Investors. https://cyprusfintechsummit.com/ https://www.facebook.com/cyprusfintechsummit/videos/3593098994142802 https://www.facebook.com/cyprusfintechsummit/videos/1114337622420967 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmMfwPHXERF1cTgPStONEug https://twitter.com/cyfintechsummit The Cyprus Fintech Summit is an international summit dedicated to the future of technological innovation in financial services. Top-tier speakers from Cyprus and abroad engage in meaningful conversations about the Cypriot FinTech Scene, the future of international fintech, crypto, blockchain, banking and payment institutions. The #CFS2022 goal is to build deep networking connections with local and international investors, corporations, innovators, c-level executives, governmental officials, and other fintech enthusiasts via one-to-one meetings and interactive panel discussions. Chat #1: Governance of FinTech in Europe Chat #2: Legal & Regulation in Fintech Chat #3: FinTech Product Development Chat #4: FinTech innovation on Blockchain technologies Chat #5: Funding a FinTech company Title: How the fintech sector is evolving. Prospects and challenges. Can we make the financial system more efficient using technology? Title: The impact of law, regulation and policy in Fintech. What is happening in Cyprus, Europe and internationally? Is regulation killing or helping innovation? Title: How do you build an awesome Fintech Product? Title: Will Blockchain lead the fintech innovation space in the next Title: Financing fintech startups and scaleups. andreas livadiotis helen yu devie mohan kyriakos kokkinos petros archontides evdokia pitsillidou christoforos florou tim byun antonia michail hostess yiannos ashiotis nikolas xenophontos branka van der linden nikolas demetriades helen yu andreas livadiotis michalis antoniou stanislav bublik hess adnani tony poulos yiannis menelaou bartlomiej lalek george agathangelou matteo rizzi xavier gomez dimitris kalavros gousiou konstantinos lafkas dr celia hadjichristodoulou

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HI GYM
by ytooR 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/) secure email.

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Norman M. Brothers Jr | About UPS
by Gunnar Larson 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

https://about.ups.com/ca/en/our-company/leadership/norman-m-brothers-jr.html Norman M. Brothers, Jr. EVP & Chief Legal and Compliance Officer <https://about.ups.com/ca/en/our-company/leadership/norman-m-brothers-jr.htm…> Norm Brothers is Executive Vice President (EVP) and Chief Legal and Compliance Officer at UPS. He leads the company’s Legal, Internal Audit, Compliance, Information Security and Privacy functions, as well as its Global Labor Relations and Global Security Operations. In this role, he is responsible for identifying and managing enterprise-wide legal risks and ensuring compliance with international, federal, state and local laws in the more than 200 countries where UPS operates around the world. He is a member of the company's Executive Leadership Team, which is responsible for long-term strategy and operating plans for the company's worldwide operations. He also serves as UPS’s Corporate Secretary, advising and supporting the UPS Board of Directors. Norm began his UPS career in 2000 as an attorney in the Corporate Legal Department. He has led various legal practice areas, including litigation, privacy, corporate, business development, regulatory compliance and international. He previously served as the company’s Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. Prior to joining UPS, Norm served on active duty as a captain in the U.S. Army, where he was a military prosecutor in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. He also practiced at the international law firm King & Spalding. Norm received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree from Emory University School of Law. He has attended executive education courses at the Yale School of Management and The Wharton School. Norm serves on the Board of Directors of Reach for Excellence, the Board of Trustees of Marist School and the Atlanta Police Foundation. He was the former Chair of the Emory University Board of Visitors and the Georgia Justice Project. He serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the Corporate Counsel Section of the Georgia Bar and Chairman of the Georgians for Lawsuit Reform. Norm was a member of the Leadership Atlanta Class of 2015. *Legal and Compliance protect the brand. We are problem solvers and facilitators for achieving the objectives of our business partners and providing outstanding service to the UPS customer. Legal and Compliance advocate for doing the right things, the right way, all the time; steadfastly working to ensure commitment to the highest standards at the company.* - NORMAN M. BROTHERS, JR.

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Cryptocurrency: Freedom Routes Around ChainAnalysis, BTC Fork, Real Crypto Privacy, Blockstream, Scale
by grarpamp 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

If your cryptocurrency doesn't have a level of privacy roughly at least equivalent to 128-bit of operations needed to break it per account, and per L1, whether from mix-like operations, pure cryptographic based, ZK, or otherwise... then, like not even NFT self-sales, it's simply not a real cypherpunk cryptocurrency, and will NOT EVER in the end result in any Freedom for Humanity... and on the contrary, it will be used to fuck Humanity severely, and thus should be abandoned immediately. Develop, deploy, and use... Crypto-Privacy Enabled Freedom. Fork-Inherit BTC's current UTXO set into a private cryptocurrency that scales. No one loses, everyone wins. Lightning is a joke, and a fraud upon bidirectional offline p2p, and the NSA-type adversaries love it, as well as BTC's non-TLS and non-privacy.

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Mollusk starts polishing fresh turds - the Hunter Biden Nothingburger & a known Nazbol-wannabe in this case.
by professor rat 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

" . . . the guy Elmo decided would be a credible voice to tell us what happened with the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” story. https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/12/03/matty-taibbis-dick-pics/ An ounce of sanity Vs a garbage-scow-load from Gramps - we repost - you decide

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SpyVeillance: TrustCor CA Exposed As GovCorp SpySploit Operation
by grarpamp 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/08/trustcor-internet-addr… https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mysterious-company-with-governmen… https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-security-policy/c/oxX69KFvsm4… Major Web Browsers Drop Mysterious Authentication Company After Ties To US Military Contractor Exposed TrustCor Systems vouches for the legitimacy of websites. But its physical address is a UPS Store in Toronto. Mysterious company with government ties plays key internet role An offshore company that is trusted by the major web browsers and other tech companies to vouch for the legitimacy of websites has connections to contractors for U.S. intelligence agencies and law enforcement, according to security researchers, documents and interviews. Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, nonprofit Firefox and others allow the company, TrustCor Systems, to act as what’s known as a root certificate authority, a powerful spot in the internet’s infrastructure that guarantees websites are not fake, guiding users to them seamlessly. The company’s Panamanian registration records show that it has the identical slate of officers, agents and partners as a spyware maker identified this year as an affiliate of Arizona-based Packet Forensics, which public contracting records and company documents show has sold communication interception services to U.S. government agencies for more than a decade. One of those TrustCor partners has the same name as a holding company managed by Raymond Saulino, who was quoted in a 2010 Wired article as a spokesman for Packet Forensics. Saulino also surfaced in 2021 as a contact for another company, Global Resource Systems, that caused speculation in the tech world when it briefly activated and ran more than 100 million previously dormant IP addresses assigned decades earlier to the Pentagon. The Pentagon reclaimed the digital territory months later, and it remains unclear what the brief transfer was about, but researchers said the activation of those IP addresses could have given the military access to a huge amount of internet traffic without revealing that the government was receiving it. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on TrustCor. TrustCor also did not respond to a request for comment. [Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life] TrustCor’s products include an email service that claims to be end-to-end encrypted, though experts consulted by The Washington Post said they found evidence to undermine that claim. A test version of the email service also included spyware developed by a Panamanian company related to Packet Forensics, researchers said. Google later banned all software containing that spyware code from its app store. A person familiar with Packet Forensics’ work confirmed that it had used TrustCor’s certificate process and its email service, MsgSafe, to intercept communications and help the U.S. government catch suspected terrorists. “Yes, Packet Forensics does that,” the person said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential practices. Packet Forensics counsel Kathryn Temel said the company has no business relationship with TrustCor. She declined to say whether it had had one previously. The latest discovery shows how the technological and business complexities of the internet’s inner workings can be leveraged to an extent that is rarely revealed. Concerns about root certificate authorities, though, have come up before. In 2019, a security company controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates that had been known as DarkMatter applied to be upgraded to top-level root authority from intermediate authority with less independence. That followed revelations about DarkMatter hacking dissidents and even some Americans; Mozilla denied it root power. In 2015, Google withdrew the root authority of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) after it allowed an intermediate authority to issue fake certificates for Google sites. With Packet Forensics, a paper trail led to it being identified by researchers twice this year. Mostly known for selling interception devices and tracking services to authorities, the company is four months into a $4.6 million Pentagon contract for “data processing, hosting and related services.” In the earlier spyware matter, researchers Joel Reardon of the University of Calgary and Serge Egelman of the University of California at Berkeley found that a Panamanian company, Measurement Systems, had been paying developers to include code in a variety of innocuous apps to record and transmit users’ phone numbers, email addresses and exact locations. They estimated that those apps were downloaded more than 60 million times, including 10 million downloads of Muslim prayer apps. Measurement Systems’ website was registered by Vostrom Holdings, according to historic domain name records. Vostrom filed papers in 2007 to do business as Packet Forensics, according to Virginia state records. Measurement Systems was registered in Virginia by Saulino, according to another state filing. After the researchers shared their findings, Google booted all apps with the spy code out of its Play app store. Tremel said that “a company previously associated with Packet Forensics was a customer of Measurement Systems at one time” but that there was no ownership stake. When Reardon and Egelman looked deeper at Vostrom, they found it had registered the domain name TrustCor.co, which directed visitors to the main TrustCor site. TrustCor has the same president, agents and holding-company partners listed in Panamanian records as Measurement Systems. A firm with the same name as one of the holding companies behind both TrustCor and Measurement Systems, Frigate Bay Holdings, filed papers to dissolve this March with the secretary of state in Wyoming, where it was formed. The papers were signed by Saulino, who listed his title as manager. He could not be reached for comment. TrustCor has issued more than 10,0000 certificates, many of them for sites hosted with a dynamic domain name service provider called No-IP, the researchers said. That service allows websites to be hosted with constantly changing Internet Protocol addresses. Because root authority is so powerful, TrustCor can also give others the right to issue certificates. Certificates for websites are publicly viewable so that bad ones should be exposed sooner or later. There have been no reports so far that the TrustCor certificates have been used inappropriately, for example by vouching for impostor websites. The researchers speculated that the system is only used against high-value targets within short windows of time. The person familiar with Packet Forensics’ operations agreed said that was in fact how it has been used. “They have this position of ultimate trust, where they can issue encryption keys for any arbitrary website and any email address,” Egelman said. “It’s scary this is being done by some shady private company.” The leadership page of the TrustCor’s website lists just two men, identified as co-founders. Though that page does not say so, one of them died months ago, and the other’s LinkedIn profile says he left as chief technology officer in 2019. That man declined to comment. The website site lists a contact phone number in Panama, which has been disconnected, and one in Toronto, where a message had not been returned after more than a week. The email contact form on the site doesn’t work. The physical address in Toronto given in its auditor’s report, 371 Front St. West, houses a UPS Store mail drop. TrustCor adds another layer of mystery with its outside auditing firm. Instead of using a major accounting firm that rates the safety of internet infrastructure companies, TrustCor selected one called Princeton Audit Group, which gives its address as a residential townhouse in Princeton, N.J. In addition to TrustCor’s certificate power, the firm offers what purports to be end-to-end encrypted email, MsgSafe.io. But researchers said the email is not encrypted and can be read by the company, which has pitched it to a variety of groups worried about surveillance. MsgSafe has touted its security to a variety of potential customers, including Trump supporters upset that Parler had been dropped by app stores in January 2021, and to users of encrypted mail service Tutanota who were blocked from signing on to Microsoft services. “Create your free end-to-end encrypted email today with over 40 domains to choose from and are guaranteed to work with Microsoft Teams,” the company tweeted in August. Reardon sent test messages over MsgSafe that appeared unencrypted in transmission, meaning MsgSafe could read them at will. Egelman ran the same test with the same result. Jon Callas, a cryptography expert at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also tested the system at The Post’s request and said that MsgSafe generated and kept the private key for his account, so that it could decrypt anything he sent. “The private key has to be under the person’s control to be end-to-end,” Callas explained. Packet Forensics first drew attention from privacy advocates a dozen years ago. In 2010, researcher Chris Soghoian attended an invite-only industry conference nicknamed the Wiretapper’s Ball and obtained a Packet Forensics brochure aimed at law enforcement and intelligence agency customers. The brochure was for a piece of hardware to help buyers read web traffic that parties thought was secure. But it wasn’t. “IP communication dictates the need to examine encrypted traffic at will,” the brochure read, according to a report in Wired that quoted Saulino as a Packet Forensics spokesman. “Your investigative staff will collect its best evidence while users are lulled into a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail or VOIP encryption,” the brochure added. The brochure told customers they could use a decryption key provided by a court order or a “look-alike key.” Researchers thought at the time that the most likely way the box was being used was with a certificate issued by an authority for money or under a court order that would guarantee the authenticity of an impostor communications site. They did not conclude that an entire certificate authority itself might be compromised. Obtaining trusted root certificate authority takes time and money for the infrastructure and for the audit that browsers require, experts say. Each browser has slightly different requirements. At Mozilla’s Firefox, the process takes two years and includes crowdsourced and direct vetting as well as an audit. But all of that typically focuses on formal statements of technological steps, rather than mysteries of ownership and intent. The person familiar with Packet Forensics said the big tech companies probably were unwitting participants in the TrustCor play: “Most people aren’t paying attention.” “With enough money, you or I could become a trusted root certificate authority,” said Daniel Schwalbe, vice president of technology at web data tracker DomainTools. Mozilla currently recognizes 169 root certificate authorities, including three from TrustCor. The case gives new focus to problems with that system, in which critical tech companies outsource their trust to third parties with their own agendas. “You can’t bootstrap trust, it has to come from somewhere,” Reardon said. “Root certificate authorities are the kernel of trust from which it is all built on. And it will always be shaky, because it will always involve humans, committees and decision-making.” Reardon and Egelman alerted Google, Mozilla and Apple to their research on TrustCor in April. They said they have heard little back. Google did not respond to a request for comment. Mozilla said it would say more after reviewing details from the researchers. Major Web Browsers Drop Mysterious Authentication Company After Ties To US Military Contractor Exposed This week several major web browsers quickly severed ties with a mysterious software company used to certify the security of websites, three weeks after the Washington Post exposed its connections to a US military contractor, the Post reports. TrustCor Systems provided 'certificates' to browsers to Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge, which vouched for the legitimacy of said websites. "Certificate Authorities have highly trusted roles in the internet ecosystem and it is unacceptable for a CA to be closely tied, through ownership and operation, to a company engaged in the distribution of malware," said Mozilla's Kathleen Wilson in an email to browser security experts. "Trustcor’s responses via their Vice President of CA operations further substantiates the factual basis for Mozilla’s concerns." According to TrustCor's Panamanian (!?) registration records, the company has the same slate of officers, agents and officers as Arizona-based Packet Forensics, which has sold communication interception services to the U.S. government for over a decade. One of those contracts listed the “place of performance” as Fort Meade, Md., the home of the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command. The case has put a new spotlight on the obscure systems of trust and checks that allow people to rely on the internet for most purposes. Browsers typically have more than a hundred authorities approved by default, including government-owned ones and small companies, to seamlessly attest that secure websites are what they purport to be. -WaPo Also of concern, TrustCor's small staff in Canada lists its place of operation at a UPS Store mail drop, according to company executive Rachel McPherson, who says she told their Canadian staffers to work remotely. She also acknowledged that the company has 'infrastructure' in Arizona as well. McPherson says that ownership in TrustCor was transferred to employees despite the fact that some of the same holding companies had invested in both TrustCor and Packet Forensics. Various technologists in the email discussion said they found TrustCor to be evasive when it came to basic facts such as legal domicile and ownership - which they said was not appropriate for a company responsible for root certificate authority that verifies a secure 'https' website is not an imposter. The Post report built on the work of two researchers who had first located the company’s corporate records, Joel Reardon of the University of Calgary and Serge Egelman of the University of California at Berkeley. Those two and others also ran experiments on a secure email offering from TrustCor named MsgSafe.io. They found that contrary to MsgSafe’s public claims, emails sent through its system were not end-to-end encrypted and could be read by the company. McPherson said the various technology experts had not used the right version or had not configured it properly. -WaPo In a previous case which illustrates the importance of trusting root-level authorities - a security company controlled by the United Arab Emirates, DarkMatter, applied in 2019 to have top-level root authority from their status as an intermediate authority with less independence. The request followed revelations that DarkMatter had hacked dissidents and even some Americans - after which Mozilla denied it root power. "Received email from DDNS no-IP, they offering free TrustCor Standard DV SSL certificate." "Free, comes complete with spyveillance and exploit, lol." "Imagine that even the most trusted CA's are actually rogue!"

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Exit Lopp
by professor rat 04 Dec '22

04 Dec '22

Jameson Lopp could pass himself off as a cypherpunk until recently. Even a professional cypherpunk! ( Military grade encryption? ) So what bought him down? Well, in one word I would say " Ethereum ". Cypherpunks collapse govts - they don't suck up to them. That's the Circle-of-Eunuchs dept. And now, increasingly the Ether-Huffers. Meantime Bitfinex CTO, Paolo Ardoino is currently bragging about managing a huge amount of ETH ( over a billion USD's worth ) while at the same time preening, posing and posturing as some sort of expert on OG c-punks & revolutionary P2P technology. Another damn fool thinks they can run with the fox and hunt with the hounds - well this won't last long. Paolo will soon come a CROPPER.

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