October 2023 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Cryptocurrency: WikiLeaks Afghan War Logs Inscribed, Project Spartacus, Free Julian Assange !!!
by grarpamp 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

Expect an insurance dump before long... Someone Is Inscribing All Of WikiLeaks' Infamous Afghan War Logs On Bitcoin https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/someone-is-inscribing-all-of-wikileaks-… https://ordinals.com/inscription/911bffcff4608ab49e639ac55c314d1d8c2b97b51b… https://projectspartacus.org/ https://twitter.com/Stella_Assange/status/1709524946479685791 https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/assange-extradition-cfaa-hacking/ https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/26/password-cracking-conspiracy-theory-assa… Authored by NAMCIOS via BitcoinMagazine.com What's started with a mysterious inscription on October 7 may end up turning into the latest global protest in support of journalist and activist Julian Assange. As revealed by Bitcoin Magazine, an unknown "Project Spartacus" has formed in an attempt to immortalize on bitcoin the classified information that the U.S. government has long alleged Julian Assange illegally provided to journalists in the infamous Afghan War Diary. Following the inscription, an anonymous individual has contacted Bitcoin Magazine claiming responsibility for the project, which aims to inscribe the tens of thousands of logs from the Afghan War published by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks in July 2010 into the bitcoin blockchain. These logs created a big upheaval in U.S. media at time they were published, and elicited strong reactions from the country's government. Notably, the content of the logs not only differed from what had been presented in mainstream media but also offered troubling insights into what actually happened in Afghanistan. At times, the logs raised questions about the conduct of some U.S. military operations. On this day in 2006 Julian #Assange created @wikileaks. Julian is 52 now. He was 38 when WikiLeaks published Collateral Murder and was last free. The video shows the US army killing a dozen civilians, including two Reuters employees on assignment and the rescuers who stopped to… pic.twitter.com/IfISuj83W7 — Stella Assange #FreeAssangeNOW (@Stella_Assange) October 4, 2023 The publication of the war logs, which was coordinated with The Guardian, The New York Times, and others, caused a spur inside the government. The first indictment brought against Assange focused on an alleged conspiracy between him and Chelsea Manning to crack an account on a computer in her military base. Per the charges, the “primary purpose of the conspiracy was to facilitate Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information.” However, as reported by The Intercept, it later became clear that the alleged hacking not only didn’t happen, but it also couldn’t have happened. New testimony, reported by investigative news site Shadowproof, also showed that Manning already had authorized access to, and the ability to exfiltrate, all of the documents that she was accused of leaking — without receiving any technical help from WikiLeaks. In truth, the indictment describes the kinds of activities conducted by many news organizations and journalists every day, including obtaining and publishing true information of public interest, communication between a publisher and a source, and using encryption tools. In addition to the Afghan War logs, WikiLeaks also published those of the Iraq War. This picture depicts a wounded Iraqi being loaded onto a van during an attack by Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff on July 12, 2007. Ho New / Reuters file It seems this backdrop is the context through which Project Spartacus attempts to take a foothold in the bitcoin ecosystem. The project leverages the Ordinals protocol, a metaprotocol for bitcoin that lets anyone add arbitrary data to the original cryptocurrency's blokchain. Given the properties of bitcoin and its decentralized network of nodes, once data is added to its blockchain it can never be removed or altered. Such properties are seemingly great for the use case of combating censorship of information. Under this light, it seems Project Spartacus aims to take a stand towards freedom of information and knowledge, making it impossible for anyone to mess with the data that Assange risked his life to make public. The journalist currently faces potential extradition to the U.S., despite being an Australian citizen and not having committed alleged offenses on U.S. soil. The outcome of the extradition process remains uncertain, and concerns continue to grow regarding his future and whether he will ever regain his freedom. Project Spartacus's website provides a public interface through which any person can “inscribe” –– Ordinals jargon for adding data to bitcoin –– a war log. There seem to be no fees associated with this action apart from network fees, a necessary component to any transaction submitted to the bitcoin network. The page also features a "donate" button, which opens up a panel through which users can optionally send bitcoin to Assange's cause. Donations are said to go towards supporting the following organizations: Freedom of the Press Foundation, The Information Rights Project and Reporters Without Borders. A huge rectangular button appears on the main page, reading "Publish War Log." Upon clicking, the process of inscribing a war log is triggered. The user is given the option to choose how many logs to inscribe, with a maximum of 300 war logs per transaction. The user can then select the transaction fee, based on which a total amount for payment is calculated. Upon hitting "continue," the user then is presumably redirected for payment. BITCOIN: MORE THAN MONEY? Commonly seen as a monetary network, bitcoin can also serve as a decentralized and unstoppable publishing technology thanks to the Ordinals protocol. Created last year by bitcoin developer Casey Rodarmor, Ordinals aims to make it easy for anyone to add data to bitcoin –– be it text, image, video, HTML or Markdown. The development saw a parabolic surge in activity within a short few months. The amount of inscriptions added to bitcoin in the first 200 days following the launch of Ordinals was greater than the number of Ethereum NFTs created in the same 200-day period after nonfungible tokens went live on ETH. This rise in popularity caused a big fee spike on the bitcoin blockchain, leading some users to complain about the perceived “uselessness” of adding arbitrary data to what should arguably be a monetary network. Since bitcoin is ruled by rules, not rulers, and Ordinals transactions abide by the protocol’s rules, the activity was able to continue and thrive for months, leading to a plethora of applications and new developments being built on the original cryptocurrency. Project Spartacus takes a spin on Ordinals’ popular use case of doing NFTs on the mother chain to seemingly focus on complete data finality on a decentralized chain of information, which is run by tens of thousands of nodes in hundreds of different jurisdictions around the world. In this sense, Ordinals may very well be the ultimate publishing tool that many in the world have been looking for to fight information censorship and tampering.

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Collapse: Earth Overshoot Day
by grarpamp 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

You stupid Humans ran out of resources three days ago on 2021-07-29... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day https://www.overshootday.org/ https://www.footprintnetwork.org/

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Ukraine claims to have invented a new radio that's immune to Russian jamming
by jdb10987＠yahoo.com 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

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New Scientist: Mathematician warns US spies may be weakening next-gen encryption
by jdb10987＠yahoo.com 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

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Cryptocurrency: Silk Roads and World Islands, History Replays Into Digital Realm
by grarpamp 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

The Digital Frontier, any frontier... the same old fight over the same old islands... who will win the short and long term. Struggle For The World-Island https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/10/07/struggle_for_the_world… https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/20131016_MackinderTheGeograp… https://stories.cnas.org/the-return-of-marco-polos-world-and-the-u-s-milita… https://thediplomat.com/2023/09/how-chinas-belt-and-road-took-over-the-worl… https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/09/chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-politi… https://thehill.com/policy/international/4209597-china-flies-100-warplanes-… https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-insists-s-not-trying-conta… In 2017, Robert D. Kaplan wrote an essay describing the geopolitical eclipse of Europe by Asia in the 21st century, and what this meant for U.S. foreign policy. Though Kaplan used the provocative title, “The Return of Marco Polo’s World and the U.S. Military Response,” his analysis was grounded in geography and history. What Kaplan and others have called the Long European War of the 20th century (World Wars I and II, and the Cold War) gave rise to the beginnings of what could be a Long Asian War in which China and the United States struggle for control of the World-Island. Kaplan described a “new strategic geography” where “Europe disappears, Eurasia coheres,” and the “interactions of globalization, technology, and geopolitics” fulfill Sir Halford Mackinder’s vision of a Eurasian-African supercontinent that he called the “World-Island” in his 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality. Mackinder warned that control of the World-Island meant command of the world. Kaplan was among the first observers to see a link between China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and potential command of the World-Island. In his essay, he noted China’s attempts “to build a land bridge across Central and West Asia to Europe, and a maritime network across the Indian Ocean from East Asia to the Middle East.” Although China called the BRI “infrastructure projects” reminiscent of the medieval Silk Road, the political and geopolitical implications should have been evident from the outset of the program, which President Xi Jinping announced in September 2013. Mackinder had written about the migrations of Asian hordes into the settled regions of the Old World, laying special emphasis on the Mongol Empire, which at its height stretched from East Asia to eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East, and from Russia to India, China, and parts of Southeast Asia. The Mongols, Mackinder noted, came the closest of all the Asian invaders to achieving effective political control of the World-Island. The two most important factors limiting the Mongol reach were insufficient manpower and technological constraints. China in the 21st century suffers from neither geopolitical weakness. The remarkable thing about China’s BRI is how it replicates the World-Island on the map. In a fascinating article in The Diplomat entitled “How China’s Belt and Road Took Over the World,” Shannon Tiezzi shows the geographical evolution of the BRI. In 10 years, the BRI has extended its reach to 154 countries. On the Eurasian-African World-Island, only India, North Korea, Jordan, and a few nations of Western Europe have escaped China’s financial and infrastructure grasp. Indeed, the BRI extends beyond the World-Island to nations in the western and southern Pacific, Central and South America, and some islands in the Caribbean (including Cuba). Tiezzi notes that China has spent $564 billion on BRI-related projects in its 10-year history. China is not sending armies to the nations of its BRI empire, but it is sending bankers, financiers, technocrats, engineers, and spies. Empire-building in the 21st century comes in many shapes and sizes. What beganas an economic and infrastructure initiative has gradually shifted to politics. The BRI, writes China-expert Felix Chang, “has become a key feature of Xi’s foreign policy.” The leaders in Beijing, Chang explains, have “always regarded the initiative as a way to garner political support and create new spheres of influence.” For China, Chang concludes, political aims of the BRI outweigh economic ones. The BRI was a geopolitical program from the very beginning. Some observers of the BRI focus their analyses on the land road through Central Asia to Europe, but the maritime aspect of the BRI may be even more important. Robert Kaplan understands that more than most geopolitical thinkers. In his Marco Polo essay, Kaplan noted that “the United States is a maritime power, operating from the greatest of the island satellites of the Eurasian supercontinent.” And in the 21st century, as during the mid and late 20th century, maritime power has both naval and air components. China’s maritime Silk Road is a direct challenge to America’s maritime supremacy. It is reminiscent of Imperial Germany’s challenge to Great Britain in the years leading up to the First World War, and of Japan’s challenge to both British and American naval and air power in the western and south Pacific in the years leading up to the Second World War. Our response, according to Kaplan, should be “to extend the concept of the Asia pivot to encompass the entire navigable rimland of Eurasia, including not only the Western Pacific but the Indian Ocean as well.” U.S. sea power, Kaplan writes, “is the compensatory answer for shaping geopolitics . . . Here is where the ideas of Alfred Thayer Mahan meet those of Halford Mackinder.” Mackinder, it should be noted, recognized the value of predominant sea power to island nations such as Great Britain and the United States. His great fear was that a hostile Eurasian land power (or alliance of land powers) could use the immense resources of continental Eurasia to attain maritime supremacy over the island democracies. If that happened, he wrote in 1904, “the empire of the world would then be in sight.” He even suggested that China, with its long oceanic frontage, allied to Russia could achieve dominance on land and at sea. The immense growth of Chinese naval power and its proclaimed desire to exert control over the entire South China Sea (including reunifying with Taiwan) should be viewed in the context of the maritime component of the BRI. For it is the maritime route from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean that links Eurasia to the Middle East and Africa, just as the land component of the Silk Road links East Asia to Central Asia and to Europe. It is roads, rails, and shipping lanes that can cohere the Eurasian-African World-Island. The first battle of the Long Asian War may be fought in the South China Sea. China’s pressure on Taiwan has increased exponentially. In a recent 24-hour period, the PLA launched 103 warplanes toward Taiwan, causing Taiwanese spokespersons to warn of escalation should the provocative and dangerous sorties continue. This comes on the heels of China’s recent expansion of its nine-dash line to ten dashes, including one located east of Taiwan. It also comes in the wake of President Biden’s remark while visiting Vietnam that the United States does not want to contain China. The struggle for the World-Island has begun. Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month.

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Spy vs Spy: Claims On China Global Infiltration
by grarpamp 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/inside-chinas-long-game-to-infiltrate… https://www.theepochtimes.com/china/portman-report-exposes-chinas-subversiv… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/feinsteins-close-china-ties-under-scrutiny… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-ethics-committee-concludes-probe-int… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/fbi-arrests-2-for-operating-secret-chinese… https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/house-passes-first-ever-us-bill-to-punish-… https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/sen-hawley-responds-to-ccp-letter-on-… As Chinese authorities escorted the senior Federal Reserve official from his Shanghai hotel room, they demanded he “say good things about China" when back in the United States. (Illustration by The Epoch Times, Getty Images, Shutterstock) The atmosphere was “frightening,” the official, who remained unnamed, recalled to the Fed. That was the first of four times the official was detained and interrogated during a 2019 trip to Shanghai. Chinese authorities threatened his family, tapped his phones and computers, and copied contact information of other Federal Reserve officials from his account on Chinese social media app WeChat, according to Senate Homeland Security Committee Republicans who made public the details in a report last July. The U.S. official recounted Chinese authorities trying to pry “sensitive, non-public economic data” out of him and insisting that he “advise senior government officials” on sensitive economic issues such as trade tariffs while the United States and China were embroiled in a trade war. They forced him to drink liquor and attempted to make him commit to future meetings to allow them to gather economic intelligence. Unsettling as it is, the incident was but part of a “long-running and brazen” malicious campaign from China over the course of more than a decade to undermine U.S. economic policy and advance Beijing’s ambition to supplant the United States as the global superpower. Coercion and threats represent only a sliver of the regime’s toolbox used to target the Western political sphere. A Chinese think tank based in Beijing, in partnering with the state-affiliated Tsinghua University, in 2019 rated White House advisors and U.S. governors by their friendliness to Beijing. The group labeled officials as “friendly,” “ambiguous,” or “hardline” after combing through metrics such as age, work history, public statements, trade activities with China, and length of term. Time, patience, and thoroughness—these are attributes that Michel Juneau-Katsuya, former Asia Pacific chief at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in the 1990s, sees in the Chinese regime’s craft of infiltration. “They've been capable to work in a very holistic way,” he told The Epoch Times. China, he noted, doesn’t have a democratic election process that could displace the leadership from power. “So they know that they can plant today something that will be capable to be harvested in five, 10 or 15 years.” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who has advocated for a tougher stance on China, agreed. “They're playing the long game,” he told The Epoch Times. Biding Their Time Few if any U.S. leaders, from the federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial levels, are immune to the risk of the Chinese regime manipulating them to bolster its hidden agenda, warned the National Counterintelligence and Security Center in July last year. By leveraging relationships with U.S. officials—called “using the local to surround the central” in communist slogan terms—Beijing can pressure Washington to back policy outcomes favorable to the regime, such as deepening bilateral economic ties and tamping down criticism of the regime’s abysmal human rights record. A Chinese spy reportedly drove for the recently deceased Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for 20 years. Christine Fang with then-Dublin City Councilmember Eric Swalwell at a student event in October 2012. (Screenshot/Social media) Christine Fang, an alleged Chinese spy working for China’s top intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, reportedly used campaign fundraising, networking, and romantic relationships with at least two Midwestern city mayors to gain a footing in their spheres of influence. Ms. Fang also approached Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) when he was a member of the Dublin City Council, raised money for his 2014 reelection campaign, and facilitated an intern’s placement in Mr. Swalwell’s office, according to Axios. The connection prompted a two-year investigation from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, which in May ultimately decided not to take any action against the California lawmaker, but cautioned Mr. Swalwell to remain aware of “the possibility that foreign governments may attempt to secure improper influence through gifts and other interactions.” The United Front network, which helps the Party control the Chinese diaspora, also plays a role in co-opting well-placed individuals for Beijing’s interests. Lu Jianwang, one of the two alleged operators of a secret Chinese police station in New York, together with his brother, has given tens of thousands of dollars to New York politicians in recent years, including vice chair of the Democratic National Committee Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), New York Mayor Eric Adams, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, campaign finance records show. People walk by a building (C), which is suspected of being a secret police station on behalf of China's regime, in New York's Chinatown on April 18, 2023. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images) “Local level officials, state officials are just not going to be as aware of or as attuned to some of these influence efforts—they're just trying to create jobs,” Sarah Cook, a senior China analyst at the Freedom House, told The Epoch Times. “The CCP is very good at taking advantage of that, to get people to side with them, to get people in the United States to have a stake in what the CCP also wants. Then later, that can be activated to create situations that are more problematic.” “I think people at the earliest part of that relationship, don't realize that,” she added. As with Ms. Fang’s case, the Chinese influence operations begin early in the local leaders’ careers. “They're very, very patient, they have time on their side. Their determination and their focus is remarkable,” Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said of the regime. He said that Chinese intelligence officers-turned-defectors had detailed to him how they were instructed to be model citizens in the Western world for five to 10 years, working their way up the ladder in society before being “activated.” “When the security service or the police tried to do a background check, they find absolutely nothing,” he said. “So they are extremely, extremely deep undercover agents in that perspective," Mr. Juneau-Katsuya said. ‘Lie in Plain Sight’ Taiwan, Uyghur, Falun Gong, Tiananmen Square. The list of the Chinese Communist Party’s trigger words goes on. And the regime has made it clear that no one—in China or anywhere else—should go against its will. Late at night on March 28, a day after the House overwhelmingly passed Rep. Chris Smith’s (R-N.J.) Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, a furious email from the Chinese embassy’s minister counselor Zhou Zheng arrived at the inbox of an aide to the congressman. Doctors carry boxes containing fresh organs for transplant procedures at a hospital in Henan Province, China, on Aug. 16, 2012. (Screenshot via Sohu.com) The email, written from a Gmail account registered under Mr. Zhou, declared the bill “absurd” and claimed the “so-called ‘forced organ harvesting’ in China is a farce.” The bill was the first ever such legislative piece to curb the state-sanctioned killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs, an atrocity that an independent London tribunal in 2019 concluded has taken place in China for years “on a significant scale.” A number of whistleblowers, including eyewitnesses, have come forward to The Epoch Times to share testimony of the grisly act. Mr. Zhou, in true Beijing fashion, demanded that the United States stop "baseless hype and anti-China moves and stops preceding [sic] this legislation.” Mr. Smith said the claims in the email were "a big lie in plain sight." “The Falun Gong practitioners and the Uyghurs are being killed for their organs, and it's tens of thousands every single year, as we know,” he told The Epoch Times. “Perfectly healthy people being put down in a gurney drugged in order to effectuate two to three of their organs being taken out involuntarily—and they kill them—that is murder. That's crimes against humanity.” The New Jersey Republican on April 14 wrote to the Chinese embassy requesting a visa to visit Xinjiang, the northwestern Chinese region where an estimated 1 million Uyghurs are being held in detention camps. He hasn’t heard back. A few weeks before the email to Mr. Smith, counselor Li Xiang with the Chinese embassy wrote to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), insisting he retract his bill ordering the declassification of information surrounding COVID-19 origins, which had been signed into law on March 20. Mr. Hawley shrugged it off. “The Chinese government wrote to me and demanded I withdraw my Covid origins bill,” he wrote in a social media post on March 9. “Hahaha. Not a chance.” An Uyghur woman protests in front of policemen on a street in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, China, on July 7, 2009. (Guang Niu/Getty Images) Mr. Li also hit a wall when he tried to block a scheduled congressional hearing on the origins of COVID-19. Nor was he successful with his warning to House lawmakers not to meet with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen during her visit to Los Angeles. The audacity of the regime in making demands of an elected member of Congress “incensed” Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-Iowa), one of the recipients of the threatening letter. “Basically, I just said, ‘No, you can't tell me who I can and can't meet with and I'm going to go ahead and meet with her,’" Ms. Hinson told The Epoch Times. "And that's what we did." "The fact that somebody was bold enough to assume that they could send me an email like that, and threaten and bully me—incredulous.” “I will not be bullied, my mind is not going to be changed on an email like that, where you are deliberately trying to undermine my ability to do my job.” Read more here...

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Possible Quantum Decryption Breakthrough | NextBigFuture.com
by jdb10987＠yahoo.com 12 Oct '23

12 Oct '23

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Bounty offered for secret NSA seeds behind NIST elliptic curves algo
by jdb10987＠yahoo.com 11 Oct '23

11 Oct '23

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Everyone a producer. Everyone a consumer. Everyone a transporter
by professor rat 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

No one a communist. The only good communist is a dead one. Like James A. Donald and John Young, amirite? >>> (I use the word ‘associationist’ as an alternative to the word ‘communist,’ not because I like pointless new jargon, but because I foresee the possibility that the communist anarchists will gradually abandon the term ‘communist’; it is growing in ambivalence and falling into disrepute as a result of Russian ‘communist’ despotism. If the term is eventually abandoned this will be a repetition of what happened with the word ‘socialist.’ We who, in Italy at least, were the first champions of socialism and maintained and still maintain that we are the true socialists in the broad and human sense of the word, ended by abandoning the term to avoid confusion with the many and various authoritarian and bourgeois deviations of socialism. Thus too we may have to abandon the term ‘communist’ for fear that our ideal of free human solidarity will be confused with the avaricious despotism which has for some while triumphed in Russia and which one party, inspired by the Russian example, seeks to impose worldwide. Then perhaps we would need another adjective to distinguish us from the rest — and this could well be associationist or societist or such like, although it seems to me that simply to use the term ‘anarchist’ would suffice.) <<< FROM https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/errico-malatesta-individualism-and-… Reposts not calls to rise up and drive the noisemaking timewasters - like Semich and Gramps - out with heavy-blows and screams of hatred and execration ringing in their bleeding ears

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Sen. Tommy Tuberville needs killing ( My 2K sats )
by professor rat 10 Oct '23

10 Oct '23

Anarchist assassins didn’t start the Crypto Wars - but we will finish them, I promise you. https://marc.info/?l=cypherpunks&m=105949941027858&w=1 I guess now that the Pentagon is setting up a murder pool it can't be illegal for us to do it. --Tim May En passant a site frequented by Mong shortly before his overdue demise is now convinced the universe is right-wing, I shit you not. https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13688#comments We dodged a cosmic bullet!

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