February 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Bribes, Grease Payments and Global Litigation Finance
by Gunnar Larson 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

Check out my new article: https://litigationfinancejournal.com/bribes-grease-payments-and-global-liti… Both competition law and consumer protection law focus on eliminating global marketplace manipulation. Deceptive acts and practices in many offshore businesses are byproducts of illegal bribes, or legal grease payments. Exclusionary price fixing of international virtual currency markets suggests that innovation is necessary to level the playing field. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FoXl1frfxEWNFCkLfaJ0UdizHkQZOAT3/view?usp=…> researchers have suggested that ‘greasing the palms’ of international regulators is not necessarily forbidden. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many virtual currency firms made significant efforts to increase earnings via marketplace manipulation. Conditional regulatory approvals have prompted deceptive advertising practices which led to marketplace fraud and earnings manipulation. Famous international banks have made a business out of regulatory arbitrage frameworks … allegedly issuing bribes when necessary. To navigate such bad behavior, price fixing agreements can be negotiated as a litigation finance tool. Engaging virtual currency fixing, as with Proof of Transfer (POX) powering NYCCoin and MIA Coin, supports the idea of government “donation bounties.” Such practices are a hot topic of discussion for United States innovation policies. The Department of Justice has recently begun to consider various instances of litigation finance solutions to help eliminate cross-border bribery and marketplace manipulation architectures. For reference, we highlighted 32 key points <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FoXl1frfxEWNFCkLfaJ0UdizHkQZOAT3/view> in“The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: It’s Time to Cut Back the Grease and Add Some Guidance.” Feel free to scan the doc and see our key takeaways (highlighted inside). -- *Gunnar Larson - xNY.io <http://www.xNY.io> | Bank.org <http://Bank.org>* MSc <https://www.unic.ac.cy/blockchain/msc-digital-currency/?utm_source=Google&u…> - Digital Currency MBA <https://www.unic.ac.cy/business-administration-entrepreneurship-and-innovat…> - Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ip) G(a)xNY.io +1-646-454-9107 New York, New York 10001

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Spawn of Wikileaks
by professor rat 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

She was a conservative journalist - he reportedly ran a Ron Paul fan-club website. They allegedly traded crypto-currencies for more traditional forms of wealth. “I’m a big admirer of Ron Paul & Rand Paul for their very principled positions in the US Congress on a number of issues” ASSANGE 2013 Mange reportedly sold nearly 30 mill of crypto when fools were sending him it after WL finances were frozen about a decade ago. The Btc component went on to double its price. Classy lawyers don't come cheap and fools and their money are soon parted.

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Mobility,smartphones ,electric batteries and cryptocurrencies.
by V.I.Lenin 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

Hello! Does anyone have information about the development of electric batteries? We live in a world of electricity and the increase in battery power directly affects our future. Tesla, smartphones and quadrocopters (including flying taxis) All this is happening here and now. microsd 2 TB... The world uses digital coins... Bitcoin will go into the category of rarity either before or a little after the end of the issue. Bitcoin keys will be sold as NFT. But given his anonymity and growing sidechains, he will remain in demand. But one of the most common world coins will be Chia. It is very interesting when there will be miners for electric cars, quadrocopters and smartphones? microsd for 2 tb...it is already possible to connect to the mining pool. Algorithms such as proof of stake are not designed for decentralization and mass character. And bitcoin has not been decentralized for a long time. It is saved only by infusions of funds, resources that accept payment in it, as well as thanks to Satoshi and Wei as pioneers in the world of cryptocurrencies. In 10 years...this will be the world of Chia and Bitcoin. Does anyone have information about the development of chia miners for smartphones and Tesla?

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Re: [ot][spam][crazy][data] transformer model 'attention' improvement
by Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, Victim & Survivor of 10 Feb '22

10 Feb '22

"The straight-forward implementation of the attention operation above requires us to first compute and remember s_i for all i, leading to a O(n) time and memory complexity for each query. Transformers use _self-attention_, which issues a separate query for each position in the sequence, so the overall time and space complexity is O(n^2)." s_i is the dot product between the keys and a single query. So "s" in the paper would be "attn_weights" in the source. I think. It's looking likely that my contribution was in error, but it's seeming very hard for me to cognitively verify this.

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covaids plandemic is US political murder in africa
by Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

"The epidemic of untimely deaths among high-profile black African heads of state and key government ministers and physicians who opposed Bill Gates/COVAX policies provoked a wave of conspiracy theories suggesting that these men were murdered to silence dissent. The phenomenon was so striking during the first year of the pandemic that both Reuters and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published articles seeking to explain the troubling trend." https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/5/e005587 "The article points out that the overall death rates (1:33) among African elected leaders from COVID are seven times the rates for their sex and age and demographics of the general population during that time period." "We have since learned that the CIA and the Belgian intelligence agencies collaborated in Lumumba’s murder. (In 2002, Belgium formally apologized for its role in the assassination.) CIA Director Allen Dulles, who planned to kill Lumumba with poison toothpaste, knew that my uncle had enormous affection and admiration for Lumumba. Dulles feared that JFK would interfere with the CIA’s plan to liquidate the charismatic leader. Among other mischief, the CIA overthrew governments in Ghana in 1966 and Chad in 1982." "Congressional investigations in the 1970s exposed the CIA’s years of experimentation to develop untraceable poisons and secretive murder tools. CIA scientists, including NIH brain surgeon Maitland Baldwin, working under MKUltra’s director Sidney Gottlieb at Ft. Detrick, concocted a diabolical arsenal of assassination weaponry including beamed radio frequency radiation, pathogenic microbes, and dissipating chemicals, all intended to mimic natural deaths. This armory of toxins gave the agency capacity to assassinate uncooperative foreign leaders while avoiding suspicion. "

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Havana Syndrome may be caused by ‘pulsed energy’
by jim bell 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

Havana Syndrome may be caused by ‘pulsed energy’ https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/havana-syndrome-symptoms… Feb. 2, 2022, 2:00 PM EST / Updated Feb. 2, 2022, 6:49 PM ESTBy Ken Dilanian The mysterious and sudden brain injuries suffered by a small group of American diplomats and spies overseas were most likely caused by pulsed electromagnetic energy delivered by an external device, a panel of scientific experts working for U.S. intelligence agencies has concluded. The panel’s findings, while full of caveats, are consistent with what has been a longstanding hypothesis by intelligence officials — that a foreign adversary, most likely Russia, is responsible for at least some of the symptoms suffered by those who have fallen victim to what is commonly known as Havana Syndrome.

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Fwd: NSO offered US mobile security firm ‘bags of cash’, whistleblower claims
by Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

I guess there's often lots of stories like this. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/feb/01/nso-offered-us-mobile-security… NSO offered US mobile security firm ‘bags of cash’, whistleblower claims Tue 1 Feb 2022 12.00 EST A whistleblower has alleged that an executive at NSO Group offered a US-based mobile security company “bags of cash” in exchange for access to a global signalling network used to track individuals through their mobile phone, according to a complaint that was made to the US Department of Justice. The allegation, which dates back to 2017 and was made by a former mobile security executive named Gary Miller, was disclosed to federal authorities and to the US congressman Ted Lieu, who said he conducted his own due diligence on the claim and found it “highly disturbing”. Details of the allegation by Miller were then sent in a letter by Lieu to the Department of Justice. “The privacy implications to Americans and national security implications to America of NSO Group accessing mobile operator signalling networks are vast and alarming,” Lieu wrote in his letter. The letter was shared with the Guardian and other media partners on the Pegasus project, a media consortium led by the Paris-based Forbidden Stories that has investigated NSO and published a series of stories about how governments around the world have used the company’s spyware to target activists, journalists, and lawyers, among others. Advertisement One in five applicants to white supremacist group tied to US military NSO said it had no business with the mobile security company. The Guardian and media partners have separately learned that NSO is the subject of an active criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, according to four people familiar with the investigation. The investigation, they claim, is focused on allegations of unauthorised intrusions into networks and mobile devices. One American citizen whose mobile phone was hacked by a client of the spyware maker – and who asked not to be identified – said they were interviewed at length about the 2021 hacking incident by US authorities. Security researchers had found the individual was hacked while living outside the US and using a non-US mobile number. The DoJ also interviewed the Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui, whose iPhone was hacked using NSO technology, according to security researchers who have analysed her mobile phone. According to another person familiar with the criminal investigation, the DoJ has also been in contact with a company whose users are alleged to have been targeted by clients of NSO using Pegasus spyware. The DoJ declined to comment. NSO has previously said that it does not know how its clients use its spyware, but that the clients are meant to target only serious criminals. It has said its technology has saved “thousands of lives” by thwarting terror attacks. It has also said that it investigates credible allegations of wrongdoing by its clients. NSO has for years been considered among the world’s most sophisticated makers of spyware. When it is successfully deployed, a user of Pegasus can intercept phone calls, read messages on encrypted apps, view photographs, and turn a phone into a remote listening device. The Biden administration announced in November that it was adding NSO to the commerce department’s “entity list” – in effect, an export blacklist – after it said it found evidence that the Israeli company had supplied spyware to foreign governments, which used the tools to “maliciously target” government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics and embassy workers. The allegation at the heart of congressman Ted Lieu’s letter to the DoJ dates back to 2017. In 2017, Gary Miller – the whistleblower who agreed to be interviewed by the Guardian, the Washington Post, and Forbidden Stories – was working for a company called Mobileum, which designed, developed and sold software to protect the decades-old SS7 network, a global messaging system used for legitimate purposes by mobile phone companies, but can also be used to track mobile users’ physical location. Miller was asked to lead a web voice call that he alleged in records provided to authorities was attended by NSO executives Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, two of the group’s co-founders. NSO, Miller said, was interested in learning more about Mobileum’s access to hundreds of mobile networks around the world. Specifically, Miller has alleged the NSO executives wanted to discuss how gaining access to the mobile networks would allow NSO to “enhance the capabilities of their surveillance software”. “They stated explicitly that their product was designed for surveillance and it was designed to surveil not the good guys but the bad guys,” Miller said. He added: “They stated multiple times that their work was authorised by government agencies. They didn’t get in the details of who those government agencies were.” As the meeting progressed, Miller alleged, a member of his own company’s leadership at Mobileum asked what NSO believed the “business model” was of working with Mobileum, since Mobileum did not sell access to the global signalling networks as a product. According to Miller, and a written disclosure he later made to federal authorities, the response allegedly made by Lavie was “we drop bags of cash at your office”. Miller said the meeting ended soon thereafter. A few months later, Miller said he submitted an anonymous “tip” to the FBI in which he reported some details of the August conversation but did not hear back from authorities. In a statement to the Guardian, Lavie’s spokesperson said: “No business was undertaken with Mobileum. Mr Lavie has no recollection of using the phrase ‘bags of cash’, and believes he did not do so. However, if those words were used they will have been entirely in jest.” A representative for Lavie also said in an email to the Guardian that Lavie “strongly denies having suggested any action that was unethical or illegal”. An NSO spokesperson said in a statement to the Guardian: “The company [has] never done any business with this company. We are not aware of any DoJ investigation. In addition, NSO does not do business using cash as a form of payment. Any suggestion otherwise demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about our company.” Hulio did not respond to a request for comment. Miller has since left Mobileum and is being represented by attorney John Tye at Whistleblower Aid. Miller is currently working as a mobile security researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. He filed his whistleblower complaint to authorities at the DoJ, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission in June 2021. He then shared his account with Lieu in December 2021. There is no evidence that Mobileum ever engaged in another meeting with NSO or gave the company access to any mobile networks. Eran Gorev, who at the time was a managing partner at Francisco Partners, a US-based investment company that had an interest in NSO in August 2017, and is listed in Miller’s disclosures to authorities as having attended the meeting, said in a statement to the Guardian that he had not been involved in NSO for more than three years and had “no recollection” of ever meeting with or speaking with Mobileum. He said if such a meeting did take place, he would “absolutely never make a comment like this” and that if someone else did, “it would “clearly have been made in jest and a colloquial expression/cultural misunderstanding”. Gorev also said that during the time he was “involved” with NSO, the company complied with all applicable laws with “strict oversight by the Israeli government” and had instituted a business ethics committee. Asked about the details of the meeting, Mobileum said in a statement shared with the Pegasus project: “Mobileum does not have – and has never had – any business relationship with NSO Group.” It added: “Mobileum takes the data privacy of its customers information very seriously and has implemented a robust cybersecurity program to prevent any breaches. Mobileum does not have any direct access to the customer’s network and is unable to provide any kind of access, including SS7 access, to any third party.” There is no evidence that the DoJ is actively investigating Miller’s allegations. In an interview with the Pegasus project, Lieu, a former prosecutor, said: “It just looks really fishy, and it doesn’t smell right, which is why I wanted the justice department to investigate.” NSO declined to comment on Lieu’s remark.

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RED-FASCISM's threat to world health and peace
by professor rat 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

First COVID biowar, then KGB terror and now this . . . https://www.news.com.au/world/asia/north-korea-boasts-its-missiles-could-sh…

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The Eagle has landed
by professor rat 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has landed in Australia overnight to meet Asia-Pacific allies concerned by China’s rise. WikiLeaks hasn’t spread a word of support for the Hong Kong protesters or for ANY of the lands and countries oppressed by nowadays Chinese government, including Chinese citizens. They just highlight "ooh the US govt is supporting the protests!" http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/-wikileaks-related-news/23/no-comment-wikile…

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GET YOUR WAR ON!
by professor rat 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

NGOs and volunteer groups are using crypto to fund operations against Russia. https://decrypt.co/92468/ukraine-using-bitcoin-crowdfund-war-russia-report Marx to Engels, 1865: "It has ditto been shown geologically and hydrographically that a great ‘Asiatic’ difference occurs east of the Dnieper, compared with what lies to the west of it, and that (as Murchison has already maintained) the Urals by no means constitute a dividing line. Result as obtained by Duchinski: Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic race at all, they are des intrus [intruders], who must be chased back across the Dnieper . . . "

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