April 2022 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

What Elon Musk Can Learn From Mastodon—and What He Can’t
by revevilgod＠gmx.com 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Twitter’s new owner has a vision that sounds a lot like a scrappy little social network that already exists, with one key difference. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-masatodon/ FREEDOM NEVER COMES for free. In Twitter’s case, the price was $44 billion, which Elon Musk will pay to liberate the platform from its responsibilities as a public company and transform it into a free speech Xanadu. Musk wants to open source the platform’s algorithms, exile spam bots, and allow people to tweet whatever they please “within the bounds of the law.” To him, the stakes are nothing short of existential. “My strong intuitive sense,” he said in an interview at TED last week, “is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization.” Musk’s vision has fueled uncertainty about what the future of Twitter may look like. But many of those ideas are already at work on another social network, one that thousands of people have flocked to in recent days: Mastodon. Mastodon emerged in 2016 as a decentralized alternative to Twitter. It is not one website, but a collection of federated communities called “instances.” Its code is open source, which allows anyone to create an “instance” of their own. There is, for example, metalhead.club, for German metalheads, and koyu.space, a “nice community for chill people.” Each instance operates its own server and creates its own set of rules. There are no broad edicts about what people can and cannot say across the “fediverse,” or the “federated universe.” On Mastodon, communities police themselves. More than 28,000 new users joined a Mastodon server on Monday, according to the network’s creator, Eugen Rochko. Since March, when Musk first started making noise, the network has seen as many as 49,000 new accounts. For a service with 360,000 monthly active users, that’s a substantial influx. “On the Mastodon server that I manage, sign-ups have increased by 71 percent and monthly active users have increased by 36 percent,” Rochko said by email. “Many people have come back to their old accounts following the news.” Rochko once found himself in a position similar to Musk's: He was a Twitter power user with some gripes. The problem, as Rochko saw it, was centralization. A central authority meant the platform bent to the whims of its shareholders and rules could change without warning. It also meant that a platform could go defunct, something Rochko had experienced with MySpace, Friendfeed, and SchülerVZ, a German version of Facebook. A server owned and operated by the people who used it would allow greater control, including over their self-governance. Unlike Musk, Rochko did not have billions to burn. Instead, he was a 24-year-old college student, months away from graduating from a university in central Germany. So Rochko decided to build his own social network. He created the framework for Mastodon in his spare time, accepting donations from benefactors from Patreon, who were similarly interested in a Twitter alternative that returned power to the people. In 2016, shortly after graduation, he launched Mastodon to the masses. The initial wave of interest in Mastodon came from people who wanted to escape Twitter’s trolls, spam bots, and the sudden rise of @realDonaldTrump. Plus, Mastodon was fun. One early instance was based around a word-game community that excluded the letter “e.” Another instance, called Dolphin.Town, allowed people to communicate exclusively using the letter “e.” The federated nature of Mastodon allowed Rochko to skirt some of the common problems with social media moderation that have increasingly vexed companies like Twitter and Facebook. As platforms scale, it gets harder to make rules that fit every case, and it’s nearly impossible to enforce those rules across millions of users. But Mastodon’s user base was still small, and each instance was responsible for itself. If two instances had a beef, they could block each other outright, cutting off all contact between their communities. Individuals could also employ a number of blocking, muting, and reporting tools. “This gives the power to shape smaller, independent, yet integrated communities back to the people,” Rochko wrote in an early blog post. “As an end-user, you have the ability to choose an instance with the rules and policies that you agree with (or roll your own, if you are technically inclined).” By design, Mastodon’s moderation looks a lot like what Musk seems to want. Some instances are widely blocked, but no one has been “deplatformed.” While the approach has its advantages, it also has consequences. In Mastodon’s early days, people referred to it as a place to take refuge from the trolls of the internet—or, simply put, “Twitter, without Nazis.” But Nazis did eventually arrive. In 2019, when the alt-right social network Gab was shut down, a number of its users recreated their community on Mastodon. People protested, but Rochko told reporters that his hands were tied. “You have to understand it’s not actually possible to do anything platform-wide because it’s decentralized,” he said at the time. “I don’t have the control.” Still, Mastodon’s blocking tools at least make the Nazis easier to ignore. And instances can choose the rules that fit their needs, says Darius Kazemi, who runs a server called Friend Camp for about 50 of his friends and wrote a guide for others to do the same. That sounds similar to Musk’s idea that people on Twitter should be able to say what they wish, but Kazemi says in practice that ethos only works in small groups. “It’s much easier to come up with rules that 50 people agree with than moderation rules that a billion people agree with,” he says. “If I wanted to, I could probably get consensus that mentioning Elon Musk would be a bannable offense on our server. I don’t think you can do this sort of stuff at scale.” For similar reasons, Mastodon has never grown quite as big as social networks like Twitter or Reddit. Rochko says that’s because network effects are hard to replicate. People go where their friends are, and most people’s friends are still on Facebook and Twitter. Still, the fediverse has benefitted from the regular stumbles of those larger social media companies. When Tumblr announced in 2018 that it would ban “sensitive content,” like nude photography, thousands of its users migrated to Mastodon. The network also saw a surge of users after the #deletefacebook campaign the same year, and since then various complaints about Twitter have sent new users to Mastodon.

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Justice Department and SEC Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It.
by Gunnar Larson 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Justice Department and SEC Portray Serially-Charged Banks on Wall Street as Hapless Victims of Archegos Fraud. Nobody’s Buying It. <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/justice-department-and-sec-portray-s…> https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/04/justice-department-and-sec-portray-s… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens <https://wallstreetonparade.com/about-3/about/>: April 28, 2022 ~ [image: U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, Damian Williams, at Press Conference on Archegos Indictments] <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/U.S.-Attorney-for…> U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, at Press Conference on Archegos Indictments, April 27, 2022 Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) brought charges against executives at Archegos Capital Management, the family office hedge fund that blew up in March of 2021. The Justice Department brought criminal charges <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/U.S.-v-Sung-Kook-…> while the SEC and CFTC brought civil charges. Archegos founder and owner Sung Kook (Bill) Hwang and its former CFO, Patrick Halligan, were indicted on securities fraud and racketeering charges. William Tomita, the former Head Trader, and Scott Becker, the former Chief Risk Officer, have pleaded guilty for their roles in the fraud and are cooperating with the Justice Department. All three federal agencies adopted the narrative that the biggest trading houses on Wall Street were the hapless victims of the Archegos’ fraud. That narrative is going to be difficult for a jury to swallow for the following reasons: (1) the Wall Street firms invented the derivatives (total return swaps) that Archegos was using to hide its concentrated stock positions from the marketplace. The legality of those contracts has come into question <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/senate-banking-chair-sherrod-brown-s…>. Archegos had been in operation since 2013, but had never made a 13F filing with the SEC showing its stock holdings because the Wall Street banks lumped Archegos’ stock positions into the banks’ own 13F filings, making it appear to the public as if the banks actually owned these stock positions; (2) the same Wall Street firms provided Archegos with as much as 85 percent margin debt <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/archegos-wall-street-was-effectively…> on the stock trades tricked up as derivative trades, despite the federal regulation requiring a maximum of 50 percent initial margin debt on stock trades. The Justice Department said that at one point Archegos had $35 billion in capital and $160 billion in market value; (3) the same Wall Street firms were actually part of the manipulation of the stock prices in the Archegos portfolio because they were buying up the same shares to hedge their own exposure to their derivative gambles with Archegos; (4) the same Wall Street firms were incentivized to refill the punch bowl and keep the party going at Archegos because of the fat fees they were collecting; and (5) the Wall Street firms that the Justice Department alleges were defrauded by Archegos are some of the most sophisticated global trading firms on the planet and have been serially charged themselves with defrauding investors. The theory of the Archegos case by the U.S. Department of Justice was so lame that U.S. Attorney Damian Williams beat it out of his press conference yesterday after taking only a handful of questions from reporters. (You can watch the video of the press conference here <https://www.facebook.com/usaosdny>.) There was a lot of backslapping at the press conference on how fast and how great the work of the federal investigators had been to bring charges in just a little over a year since Archegos collapsed, resulting in at least $10 billion in losses to its bank counterparties. But one question from a reporter at the press conference revealed just how skimpy this investigation had been. The reporter asked if there could be “10 other individuals out there that we don’t know about,” meaning 10 other Archegos-style family office hedge funds doing business with Wall Street firms in a similar fashion. U.S. Attorney Williams responded: “It’s a fair question. I can’t speculate on what else may be out there.” If the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York concluded its investigation without knowing the full breadth and scope of what Wall Street is doing with these total return swaps for other family office hedge funds, can one really call this an investigation? In April of last year, *Wall Street On Parade* did some digging into that matter ourselves. This is part of what we reported <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/the-stock-market-is-just-one-hedge-f…> : We found that billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Willett Advisors family office hedge fund hasn’t filed a 13F since 2014 <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001509379/000114036114040025/xslFo…> and that filing showed only $273,000 in assets. According to CaproAsia <https://www.caproasia.com/2020/11/16/2020-top-10-largest-family-office-in-t…>, Willet Advisors is the seventh largest family office in the world with $25 billion in assets. (Thus, when Bloomberg News’ editorial board tells you that Archegos was “No Big Deal” <https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:l32SjfGdO4oJ:https://…> and that “there’s little regulators need to do,” you might want to take that with a grain of salt.) The public has also learned recently that the SEC doles out requests to file 13F forms on a confidential basis quite frequently. According to CaproAsia’s list of the top 10 family offices, billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions family office has $107 billion in assets. But the SEC has no 13F filing at all for the entity in its public records. Then there is billionaire James Simon, founder of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s largest hedge funds. (See Did Archegos, Like Renaissance Hedge Fund, Avoid Billions in U.S. Tax Payments through a Scheme with the Banks? <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/did-archegos-like-renaissance-hedge-…>) Simon’s family office is called Euclidean Capital. Its 13F filing for the quarter ending December 31, 2020 shows $472 million in assets <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001825034/000101297521000077/00010…>. But CaproAsia indicates that it manages $21 billion in assets. Are the rest of those assets hiding out on some bank’s balance sheet? Under the SEC’s current, billionaire-friendly, dodgy system of reporting, it’s all just one big guessing game as to whom owns what. Another example is billionaire Bill Gates’ family office, Cascade Investment LLC. According to CaproAsia it ranks number 3 among the world’s largest family offices with $51 billion in assets. Cascade Investment LLC hasn’t filed a 13F form with the SEC since the quarter ending September 30, 2008 (coincidentally, the same quarter that Wall Street blew itself up, taking the stock market along with it). At that point in time, Cascade Investment showed $4.32 billion in stock positions <https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1052192/000104746908009453/a2187455…>. Its only filings since that time simply show what stocks it’s acquired and sold, but not the 13F which would show the full positions in its portfolio and their value. We could go on and on, but you get the picture. *Wall Street On Parade* also reported in April of last year that since the Wall Street crash of 2008, equity derivative contracts similar to those held by Archegos have exploded from $737 billion to $4.197 *trillion* <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/04/archegos-unpacked-equity-derivative-…> . A 25-year former veteran staff attorney at the SEC, James Kidney, has gone on the record <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2019/01/former-sec-attorney-james-kidney-is-…> as to how not prosecuting higher ups on Wall Street at the SEC provides a shot at those seven-figure jobs on Wall Street. For how the Justice Department is similarly co-opted from prosecuting the big names on Wall Street, see here <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2021/10/the-justice-department-has-58-docume…> and here <https://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/01/one-day-after-frontline-airs-critica…> . Another big problem for the Justice Department’s case is the internal investigation conducted by the Big Law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison into Credit Suisse’s role in the Archegos implosion. (Last July, Credit Suisse released the 165-page report <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Paul-Weiss-Invest…> by Paul Weiss on its version of what happened.) Other Wall Street banks doing trades with Archegos included Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Nomura, Deutsche Bank and others. This is how the Paul Weiss report portrayed the zombie risk managers at Credit Suisse: “The Archegos-related losses sustained by CS [Credit Suisse] are the result of a fundamental failure of management and controls in CS’s Investment Bank and, specifically, in its Prime Services business. The business was focused on maximizing short-term profits and failed to rein in and, indeed, enabled Archegos’s voracious risk-taking. There were numerous warning signals—including large, persistent limit breaches — indicating that Archegos’s concentrated, volatile, and severely under-margined swap positions posed potentially catastrophic risk to CS. Yet the business, from the in-business risk managers to the Global Head of Equities, as well as the risk function, failed to heed these signs, despite evidence that some individuals did raise concerns appropriately.” And this: “…a Prime Services business with a lackadaisical attitude towards risk and risk discipline; a lack of accountability for risk failures; risk systems that identified acute risks, which were systematically ignored by business and risk personnel; and a cultural unwillingness to engage in challenging discussions or to escalate matters posing grave economic and reputational risk. The Archegos matter directly calls into question the competence of the business and risk personnel who had all the information necessary to appreciate the magnitude and urgency of the Archegos risks, but failed at multiple junctures to take decisive and urgent action to address them.” The following Tweets appeared on the Twitter page for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York shortly after it announced its findings in the Archegos matter: [image: Tweets regarding the U.S. Attorney's Indicments Against Archegos Executives] <https://wallstreetonparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Tweets-regarding-…> Now would be a good time for the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to open its own investigation and actually get to the bottom of the full scope of this fraud. -- *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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https://www.coinbase.com/price/usdp
by Gunnar Larson 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Wonder what happened? https://www.coinbase.com/price/usdp USDP Stablecoin price (USDP / USD) USDP Stablecoin is not supported by Coinbase.    $0.00000010 -100.00% -- *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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Zooko Wilcox, posing as a cypherpunk, has earned killing ( My 20 sats )
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Zooko: The Financial Industry Is Demanding Privacy ... https://bitcoinmagazine.com › culture › zooko-the-fina... 20 Apr 2016 — During a recent cryptocurrency event at the Cato Institute, Zcash CEO and longtime cypherpunkZooko Wilcox-O'Hearn . . . " CATO - A "libertarian" quasi-academic think-tank which acts as a mouthpiece for the globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism of its corporate and conservative funders. Cato is an astroturf organization: there is no significant participation by the tiny libertarian minority. They do not fund it or affect its goals. It is a creature of corporations and foundations. ( Mike Huben ) https://theworld.com/~mhuben/cato.html

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Another circle of eunuchs
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

So turns out Snowden was one of the six participants in the Zcash trusted setup that I also participated in. Which I criticized heavily for being busted . . ." https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/1519428920000622592?ref_src=twsrc%5Et…

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Marxist fascism grinds on in CHEKIST Russia
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

The Associated Press - en Español A chilling Russian cyber aim in Ukraine: Digital dossiers IBM pioneered the automated dossier-society Survivors unite to deliver message on Holocaust remembrance https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-middle-east-lifestyle-religion-eu… Holocaust survivors across the world have united to deliver a message on the dangers of unchecked hate and the importance of remembrance at a time of rising global antisemitism.

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Israeli Pegasus Spyware Case Receives Funding
by Gunnar Larson 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Check out my new article: https://litigationfinancejournal.com/israeli-pegasus-spyware-case-receives-… Israeli Pegasus Spyware Case Receives Funding The United Kingdom’s Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) has teamed up with Bindmans LLP to challenge potential misuse of the Pegasus software platform. Pegasus operates as a spyware surveillance utility that was originally developed in Israel. GLAN raised pre-litigation funding from the Digital Freedom Fund. Bindmans is now pursuing additional litigation investment for GLAN’s claim on the CrowdJustice fundraising platform. According to ThePegasusFiles.com <https://www.thepegasusfiles.com/>, mobile phone users in the United Kingdom fell prey to international governments who engaged Pegasus as a surveillance tool that automatically downloaded ‘zero click’ technology. According to GLAN, mobile phone users are generally unaware of Pegasus’ installation on their device. The covert software is designed to record phone behavior including location data, SMS messages, scan photos/videos, emails with read/write privileges. In 2020, Amnesty International originally broke the Pegasus spyware story, releasing 50,000 mobile phone numbers believed to be targeted by the software. This prompted an investigation into privacy violations by Pegasus’ developers. The Pegasus Project was launched in 2021 seeking damage awards from the malware’s proprietors. -- *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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Woke MIT realizes it has to reintroduce standardized tests
by jim bell 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

Woke MIT realizes it has to reintroduce standardized tests https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/community-family/woke-… APRIL 26, 2022 06:30 AMBY HENRY MILLER & TOM HAFER We wrote last November about MIT, our alma mater, that it "has caved repeatedly to the demands of 'wokeness,' treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large." A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion had become an article of faith, with an aggressive program of minority admissions one of the commandments. "Equity" is at the heart of this issue. It sounds a lot like "equality," and many people glide over it without appreciating the difference. In an email one of us received from an MIT professor, his signature block said "Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion." However, in current usage, they are essentially opposites: Equality means that each person is given equal opportunity; equity means that outcomes must be equal, without regard for the capabilities or efforts of the individuals concerned. Due in part to the pandemic, but also to achieve more "equity" in admissions, for the last two years, MIT dispensed with the requirement that applicants take the SAT or ACT tests. But last month, there was a new development: MIT became the first prominent university to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores. Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions, described the rationale for the decision this way in a blog post : "Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT." There was still more woke rationale to come: "Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MIT ⁠is significantly improved by considering standardized testing — especially in mathematics." Thus, "not having SAT/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education." What Schmill was really saying was that MIT doesn’t know what to do with students who just can’t cut it. At many universities, there are well-known "easy" majors such as physical education, sociology, or gender studies that are not, literally or figuratively, rocket science. So, if students find themselves unable to pass the coursework to major in, say, nuclear engineering or physics, they can move down the academic food chain. But at MIT, there are "General Institute Requirements," which are rigorous. Make that extremely rigorous. Every undergraduate has to take a semester each of chemistry and biology and two each of physics and calculus. Both MIT and a 2020 study by the University of California found that standardized test scores are superior predictors of success for students who are minorities or from low-income families. High school grades are often inflated, and admission application essays can be "coached" or actually written by hired consultants. Thus, MIT administrators were caught in a Catch-22: In order to admit and graduate unqualified minority students, they would need to lower their academic standards.

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Tariq Ali breaks with Julian Assange over Ukraine
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

https://groups.io/g/marxmail/topic/tariq_ali_on_ukraine/90737570?p=,,,20,0,… Split in the NAZBOL movement

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ANARCHISTS AGAINST PUTIN – INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOBILIZATION
by professor rat 28 Apr '22

28 Apr '22

practical mobilisation of Anarchists, their support for and their participation in the resistance against the Putin Regime’s invasion. https://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchists-against-putin-%E2%80%93-intern… RP's not E's

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