February 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

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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Defector: Alleged Masterminds Of $4.5 Billion Crypto Heist Also Auteurs Of Weapons-Grade Internet Vanity Trash
by jim bell 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

Defector: Alleged Masterminds Of $4.5 Billion Crypto Heist Also Auteurs Of Weapons-Grade Internet Vanity Trash. https://defector.com/alleged-masterminds-of-4-5-billion-crypto-heist-also-a… "The Justice Department announced today they’d arrested the two people behind the 2016 Bitfinex hack and recovered 94,636 of the 119,754 bitcoins stolen in the heist. That haul is currently valued at more than $3.6 billion, making it the largest financial seizure in United States history. That’s so much money—enough, to use an example everyone can agree is relevant, to buy the Sacramento Kings twice. Because the theft and recovery involved cryptocurrency, the details are all pretty fascinating." "For instance, one of the actual crimes the pair of alleged masterminds are accused of committing is money laundering, which is somewhat redundant given, again, that we are dealing with cryptocurrency. In this case, the feds say Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan successfully laundered 21 percent of their bitcoin plunder through a number of labyrinthine pathways, including setting up fake accounts, swapping BTC for gold, and buying a bunch of PlayStation and WalMart gift cards. The feds found the unlaundered 79 percent just, uh, sitting in Lichtenstein’s cloud storage account, which they pretty easily recovered after getting a search warrant."

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swapfiles without root
by k 09 Feb '22

09 Feb '22

i was 'asked' to generalize my memmapping idea to work for every process on a system. this became relevant for me when doing a large build on an android phone. after brief websearch, my approach was to fork microsoft's 'mimalloc' userspace allocator to provide for memmapping files on use. my fork is in the 'vmem' branch of https://github.com/xloem/mimalloc . it is a quick hack and may abort when subject to weird fork races etc. it also may let you run arbitrarily large processes on phones and raspberry pis. it makes one swapfile per process,and only cleans the swapfile up if the process terminates normally (atext() call). somebody with more systems experience than me could probably speed it up and stabilise it without much work. # to install: git clone https://github.com/xloem/mimalloc cd mimalloc git checkout vmem mkdir build cd build cmake .. make install # to enable: export LD_PRELOAD=/path/to/mimalloc.so VMEM_PREFIX=/path/to/swapfile # now processes run in this shell use per-process swapfiles

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Corporate General Counsels Look to Claim-Based Enterprise
by Gunnar Larson 08 Feb '22

08 Feb '22

Check out my new article: *Corporate General Counsels Look to Claim-Based Enterprise * The task of any good corporate general counsel is to protect the firm from loss, and recover any reasonable damages in a claim. Costs associated with running a business are leveraged against profits associated with the firm’s day-to-day operations. Most executives are risk averse in entertaining the notion of supporting a general counsel, whose baseline costs are spiraling out of control. Themis Legal Capital <https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Claim-Based-Funding-to-Reduce-the--Cost…> suggests an innovative approach to financing the modern general counsel’s office through claim-based enterprise. Given the episodic nature of meaningful litigation, budgets are often hard to estimate in advance. Once a claim comes to fruition, it can often be challenging to manage financial headaches along the way. Meanwhile, recoveries of meaningful ligiations can be 10x the investment. The debate many general counsels have is how to secure a recovery while balancing a multi-year litigation budget to yield a prospective recovery. Claim-based funding can dramatically improve the calculus for many corporate general counsel offices. Themis suggests the concept of building a portfolio of such claim-based litigation instances. As the successful rulings start rolling in, the firm may see the general counsel’s budget fully funded through payouts and settlements. This is a dream scenario which litigation funding can potentially offer. https://litigationfinancejournal.com/corporate-general-counsels-look-to-cla… -- *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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Palantir glitch allowed unauthorized access to private data
by Gunnar Larson 08 Feb '22

08 Feb '22

https://nypost.com/2021/08/25/fbi-palantir-glitch-allowed-unauthorized-acce… A computer glitch in a secretive software program used by the FBI allowed some unauthorized employees to access private data for more than a year, prosecutors revealed in a new court filing. The screw-up in the Palantir program — a software created by a sprawling data analytics company co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel — was detailed in a letter by prosecutors in the Manhattan federal court case against accused hacker Virgil Griffith. Data recovered from Griffith’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, which was obtained through a federal search warrant in March 2020, was accessed on Palantir for more than a year by at least four FBI employees, all of whom work outside New York and were not investigating the case, prosecutors wrote. The FBI case agent assigned to Griffith’s case was alerted to the unauthorized access earlier this month, when another agent emailed him and said an analyst accessed the search warrant material on Palantir, according to the letter. “An FBI analyst, in the course of conducting a separate investigation, had identified communications between the defendant and the subject of that other investigation by means of searches on the Platform that accessed the Search Warrant Returns,” the feds wrote in the letter filed Tuesday. Palantir through the program’s default settings. “When data is loaded onto the Platform, the default setting is to permit access to the data to other FBI personnel otherwise authorized to access the Platform,” prosecutors wrote in the letter. The material was accessed at least four times from May 2020 to August 2021, according to the letter. The employees who accessed the data told prosecutors that they did not recall using the information in their investigations. Manhattan prosecutors instructed Palantir employees to delete the data on Aug. 17 and said they do not intend on using the information in their case against Griffith, according to the letter. In a statement, a Palantir spokesperson said the error was caused by the FBI. “There was no glitch in the software. Our platform has robust access and security controls. The customer also has rigorous protocols established to protect search warrant returns, which, in this case, the end user did not follow,” the spokesperson said. SEE ALSO [image: The logo of U.S. software company Palantir Technologies is seen in Davos, Switzerland January 22, 2020.] <https://nypost.com/2021/08/18/palantir-buys-50m-worth-of-gold-bars-to-count…> Palantir buys $50M worth of gold bars to counter ‘black swan event’ <https://nypost.com/2021/08/18/palantir-buys-50m-worth-of-gold-bars-to-count…> The mishap could suggest a wider issue with the FBI’s use of Palantir, said Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a privacy and civil rights group. “Since this same issue will happen whenever documents are uploaded with the default settings, and since there doesn’t seem to be any sort of automated notice when they have been improperly accessed, this suggests that it’s happening a lot more than just this one case,” he said. Griffith is accused of violating international sanctions by traveling to North Korea and delivering a speech about cryptocurrency. He pleaded not guilty after his arrest in 2019 and was subsequently ordered held in jail pending his trial this year, according to court filings. An attorney for Griffith, Brian Klein, said he is looking at legal options regarding the error. “We are very troubled by what happened. We are looking into the legal remedies,” Klein said in an email. -- *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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Contracts out on Palantir's Board of Directors
by professor rat 08 Feb '22

08 Feb '22

Palantir's Board of Directors have easily done enough pure evil to join this perp on our favorite death-list. https://stiffs.com/celebrity/billgates Somebody had to be the first one to start banging on the Berlin Wall, with a sledgehammer, in 1989. Somebody had to be the first to walk through. Somebody had to be the first to stand up and say, "Enough!" And the ironic thing is, the most strangely unusual thing, is that the entire Eastern Bloc fell, almost bloodlessly, in a couple weeks, because one by one everybody realized that all that's sometimes required is to finally stand up and be counted, and to just say no to the government. When the time was right, all it took was a slight push and the dominoes tumbled down.

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KGB Wikileaks scam attempts another multi-million crypto rug-pull
by professor rat 08 Feb '22

08 Feb '22

Either another 20 plus million goes into the WL's scammers pockets or his lawyers have a picnic. Not a great look for publishing / journalism. What is it with public rightwing blegging anyway? Don't they get paid enough by corrupt plutocrats as it is?

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FORBES contributor charged with money-laundering
by professor rat 08 Feb '22

08 Feb '22

I'm shocked - SHOCKED! Forbes Contributor Arrested in $4B Bitcoin Heist https://decrypt.co/92408/heather-morgan-bitcoin-bitfinex Morgan has also tried her hand as a journalist, publishing articles for Inc and as a contributor at Forbes where she has written about everything from soul food to influencer strategies to—ironically—how to "Protect Your Business from Cybercriminals." Very Assange

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