June 2023 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Re: cypherpunks Digest, Vol 120, Issue 160
by Douglas Lucas 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

Replying to two points form Karl. First, Karl writes: "Given we have seen chip manufacturers placing hidden hardware backdoors in common microcontrollers, it seems like the use of almost any voting machine would severely undermine the intent of democracy, unless the contents are presented for full public review." Just to clarify a factual matter. The breach of the Coffee County elections building consisted of multiple intrusions in Jan 2021, each performed by a different operative or operatives. The very first intrusion, on January 7, 2021, involved (among others) four employees of Atlanta-based cyber forensics firm Sullivan Strickler. I confirmed with computer security expert for the plaintiffs Kevin Skoglund that THAT team -- I'm unsure about the later operatives -- did NOT copy any firmware from the voting computers. Seems to me ALL the operatives were moreso after operating systems, software, higher-level code, but I've only confirmed that for SullivanStrickler and their Jan 7 2021 intrusion. Second, Karl writes: "The cryptographic software communities have developed working examples of transparent voting protocols for decades now, in the hopes of these things being adopted by governments." I would appreciate any hyperlinks to these communities. I think the source code for any voting computers -- say, robustly audited optical scanners processing handmarked paper ballots -- needs to be free/open software, fully available to public inspection, always. How to get from where we are now, to there, is a difficult question. Doug > Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2023 14:54:46 -0400 > From: "Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many" > <gmkarl(a)gmail.com> > Cc: Cypherpunks <cypherpunks(a)lists.cpunks.org> > Subject: Re: New by me at BradBlog/BradCast: Elections breach cover-up > in rural town with national implications > Message-ID: > <CALL-=e6RefaD6mEfVqkVM2jtPmxEonQs8KRb6DLeS-eFeO4oDg(a)mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > > My attempt at my conventional thoughts and opinions: > > - Given we have seen chip manufacturers placing hidden hardware > backdoors in common microcontrollers, it seems like the use of almost > any voting machine would severely undermine the intent of democracy, > unless the contents are presented for full public review. > > - The cryptographic software communities have developed working > examples of transparent voting protocols for decades now, in the hopes > of these things being adopted by governments. These are some of the > same groups that have struggled as politics have heaved. > > [sorry, i had a couple more items but I've forgotten them. i've only > read a little bit of the article, it's intense, it's great to see] > > It's notable that there are a number of different severely important > things here. Many different important and dangerous topics are > involved here at once. This can make it hard to integrate the material > and possibly easier for partisan influences to change the story.

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Why does Karl Semich keep attacking our anarchist freedoms?
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

Karl writes: "The cryptographic software communities have developed working examples of transparent voting protocols for decades now, in the hopes of these things being adopted by governments." Semich repeatedly tries to conflate cypherpunks with a list like Perry Metzger's To add insult to injury he then suggests cryptoanarchists stop being anarchist alltogether - crime! Karl Semich attacks us with obfuscation, lies and obscurantism. This fascist aggression will not stand man.

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Exit Grarpamps
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

That Grarpamps goose has now comprehensively shown they are either an evil MAGAT or simply too stupid to be an anarchist. Probably both. Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out, G.

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Insider Trading Bromance Ends With Betrayal and Guilty Verdict
by Gunnar Larson 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) veteran aimed a deadpan stare at his friend on the witness stand and waited for the inevitable betrayal. Insider Trading Bromance Ends With Betrayal and Guilty Verdict https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-22/goldman-banker-s-insider…

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World well short of progress needed to meet UN’s 2030 sustainable development goals
by Gunnar Larson 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

By — Melina Walling, Associated Press World Jun 21, 2023 2:29 PM EDT The world is falling well short of the progress needed to meet the United Nations’ sustainable development goals by 2030 in areas ranging from poverty to clean energy to biodiversity, with a growing gap between wealthy and developing nations, according to a report Tuesday from the nonprofit tracking the goals. The coronavirus pandemic stalled the limited progress made in the years after United Nations member states adopted the goals in 2015. Now, halfway through the 15-year time frame, not a single one of the goals is on target to be met. “We’re at the risk of a lost decade for sustainable development,” said Guillaume Lafortune, a lead author of the report and vice president and head of the Paris office of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, the nonprofit launched by the UN to foster and track sustainable development. “And there’s actually a risk that the gap between rich and poor countries on sustainable development might be bigger in 2030 than it was in 2015.” The goals, which the authors described as “an ethical imperative,” cover a range of areas, including threats to the climate and environment but also basic human rights such as food, health and education. The authors noted that goals for reducing hunger, improving health and protecting biodiversity are particularly off-track. They said changing global governance mechanisms and global finance architecture are critical for improving progress on all the goals. Lafortune pointed to the global finance summit that opens Thursday in Paris as an important moment for the world. A main focus of the summit is how international finance can be reformed to help the developing nations that are often most vulnerable to climate change but least able to raise capital for things like transitioning to renewable energy. The report analyzed countries’ progress on the sustainability goals by assigning them scores from zero to 100. They examined factors like poverty, hunger, disease, carbon dioxide emissions, subjective well-being scores and dozens of other indicators. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Austria ranked highest. South Sudan ranked lowest, followed by the Central African Republic, Chad, Yemen and Somalia. Lafortune called particular attention to the “disappointing” United States scorecard, which he said was below average for developed countries. He said the U.S. was one of the worst performers in terms of its commitment efforts and was one of only five member countries that did not present action plans and priorities to the international community. But Lafortune did note that some U.S. cities voluntarily provided local reviews. Kimberly Marion Suiseeya, an associate professor of political science and environmental policy and culture at Northwestern University who did not work on the report, said that while she sees pressing global development shortfalls on issues like the climate emergency, she thinks the Biden administration is taking climate seriously. She also saw signs of optimism in China’s progress on renewable energy. Though the country ranked below the U.S. in the report, it has invested more in clean energy, according to research firm BloombergNEF. Anita Ramasastry, a law professor and director of the Sustainable International Development graduate program at the University of Washington, said she wasn’t surprised that the sustainable development goals are off track. Ramasastry, who had no part in the report, said she doesn’t think many governments with more advanced economies, like the U.S., have embraced the goals or made them relevant to citizens’ daily lives. She questioned whether the goals were overly ambitious and added that it will be important to examine how the 2030 agenda is financed, as well as the role of the private sector. “Business has been asked to fill a role. And I think there’s just an ultimate question, which is should we have asked business to fill that role?” she asked. “Because ultimately the SDGs are meant to be about governments and states.” The report made the same point repeatedly, singling out several “basic failures” in global governance. Those included voluntary implementation of the goals with no enforcement mechanisms when countries fall short, international trade and finance rules not geared to sustainability, and national governments not coordinating well with smaller units of government on the goals. Lafortune called for countries to keep the sustainable development goals in mind as they approach the Paris summit and other global conferences. He said Paris has the opportunity to act as an “accelerator” toward reforming international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which he sees as possible elements of a global strategy for investment in tackling climate change and other sustainable development goals. “Despite all the fragmentation right now in geopolitics, the many crises and so on, we still need to keep that sort of long-term vision and this idea of multilateralism and global cooperation alive. I think this is absolutely crucial,” Lafortune said. “I don’t think the world will be better off if we just forget about these goals because we won’t achieve them.” https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/world-well-short-of-progress-needed-to-m…

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New by me at BradBlog/BradCast: Elections breach cover-up in rural town with national implications
by Douglas Lucas 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

Hello cypherpunks, Today the BradBlog <https://BradBlog.com>, run for two decades and counting by journalist Brad Friedman -- of the syndicated United States FM radio show, the BradCast -- published my new in-depth investigative article regarding rural, Republican-leaning Coffee County down south in the swing state of Georgia, and then interviewed me for his radio show. Here's the title, subtitle, and hyperlink for the article component: /A secret meeting within a secret meeting: Unspooling the Coffee County, Georgia voting system breach and continuing cover-up/ <https://bradblog.com/?p=14697> subtitled /Cracks emerge in wall of secrecy surrounding mysterious County meeting in small town conspiracy with national implications.../ You might want to read this. I dug into scores of federal court documents to turn a sprawling story into a highly readable narrative of a little over 3500 words. As you probably know, Georgia is a battleground state. Less known, top Trumpers -- Sidney Powell et al. -- have been executing a multistate scheme to breach county elections offices and swipe software for computerized voting, presumably for hacks/rigs and/or sprinkling into their disinformation campaigns for added (pseudo-)plausibility. Georgia's Secretary of State, who's the elections head for Georgia, recently told a federal judge that his office will /not/ apply Homeland Security CISA-recommended security patches related to the breach until /after/ the 2024 general elections. Unfortunately for the conspirators, the rural county officials in question are not exactly skilled at evading Georgia public meetings transparency law, and that's where your trustily thorough, info-dense Douglas Lucas is holding them to account, though it likely will require more pushing, such as litigation to force the county boards to obey the open meetings laws. Earlier today for the associated FM radio spot, I recorded my part from West Seattle. Today's Bradcast show, 58 minutes in length, is downloadable in full as an .MP3 below. The Coffee County intro segment with me -- some 4 minutes total in length -- begins at 02:24, ends at 06:48, and the main Coffee County portion with me -- some 41 minutes total in length -- begins at 16:57, concludes at 57:07. Or if you really want to jump straight to my part of the main part (which is about 20 minutes in legnth) without the preceding summary of my article, jump straight to 37:00 and continue to 57:07. Landing page for today's radio show, has links to iTunes and others carrying the BradCast (such as Apple Podcasts <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bradcast-6-21-2023-exclusive-ga-vote-…>): https://bradblog.com/?p=14700 <https://bradblog.com/?p=14700>58-minute MP3 direct download link: https://bradblog.com/audio/BradCast_BradFriedman-FreemanMossClearedGA_Dougl… Thanks for your time, consideration, and informed effort to improve things, Douglas

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Cryptoanarchists might worry about breaking state election laws?
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

I doubt they will - but they'd be better informed about such matters from sites I quote semi-regularly than anything garbage-scow Gramps dredges up. The grarpamps moron also sez Donald Dumbfuck won! Such assertions without evidence may be dismissed without examination. DEATH to AMERICA!

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Cryptocurrency: Fixes The Waterworks Of Money
by grarpamp 22 Jun '23

22 Jun '23

The Waterworks Of Money The money system visualized as an irrigation system https://www.waterworksofmoney.com/ https://www.kunstmuseum.nl/en/exhibitions/future-our-money https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/events/opening-plumbing-the-system https://www.worldwideerc.org/news/global-workforce/workers-pay-lagging-behi… https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/03/central-bank-independence.html https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-wall-street-is-usin… https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bank-politics-9780192898609 https://www.axios.com/2022/03/31/corporate-profits-new-record-high-2021 https://www.somo.nl/shareholder-remuneration-up-by-500-in-20-years/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/world-has-gone-mad-system-broken-ray-dalio https://www.ft.com/content/1a09d4e6-e3d6-40f9-903f-2771ad7e4e0a https://cdn.janushenderson.com/webdocs/H050182_0522_English_Issue+34.pdf https://press.spglobal.com/2023-03-21-S-P-500-Q4-2022-Buybacks-Tick-up,-As-… https://www.morganstanley.com/ideas/mergers-and-acquisitions-outlook-2022-c… Authors: Carlijn Kingma (cartographer), Thomas Bollen (investigative journalist) and Martijn van der Linden (professor New Finance at The Hague University of Applied Sciences). Most countries are dealing with a ‘cost of living crisis’. High inflation is eating into the budgets of ordinary people, which were already tight. Over the past decade wages have fallen sharply behind compared to corporate profits and shareholder remuneration. Meanwhile the collapse of US banks and the bailout of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse show that financial instability remains an ongoing threat. And there may be more skeletons in the closet. Not only within the tightly regulated banking sector, but also at ‘non-banks’. In April 2023 Klaas Knot, chair of the Financial Stability Board, warned for the known unknowns at other financial institutions: ‘If they are hidden for a very long period of time, sometimes the problem then grows so big, that it only becomes unhidden or visible when it's too big to deal with.’ The problems of cost of living and financial instability cannot be seen in isolation from the design of our money system. Floods and droughts The money system is to the economy what an irrigation system is for farming lands. Just as irrigation helps crops grow, money allows the economy to flourish. But if the architecture is fragile, or the sluices and floodgates are mismanaged, severe droughts will cause hardship and suffering. During the past decade the super-rich and large corporations could borrow at record low interest rates. In 2019 hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio warned of the consequences of what he considered a ‘broken system’. He pointed out that while ‘money is essentially free for those who already have money and creditworthiness’, it’s ‘essentially unavailable’ to those who don’t. This, he explained, contributes to the widening wealth gap, opportunity gap, and political divides we see today. The financial sector flooded certain parts of the economy while other parts remained parched. During the pandemic the floodgates were opened even further. Although some free paychecks were sent to the people at the bottom of society – in the US for example several programmes were rolled out to support the unemployed – the chasm between the poor and rich grew further. The easy money boosted the markets for yacht-backed-loans and securities, dividends, share buy-backs, and M&A deals to new highs in 2021 and 2022. This came at the price of higher inflation. Ordinary citizens in many countries now struggle to make ends meet. Even despite pay raises, their real wages (accounting for the net effects of inflation) have further declined. ‘The Waterworks of Money’, an architectural map of the money system drawn by cartographer Carlijn Kingma The two-tiered state Fixing the design flaws within society’s irrigation system is not a commercial or technocratic task, but a democratic one – or as the American economist John H. Cochrane succinctly put it: ‘We voters need to tell our politicians which kind of central bank we want.’ The same applies for other parts of our money system; the payment infrastructure, the tax regime and the investment of our pension savings. Who gets the power to create and allocate new money––and for what purposes? How can we make large corporations pay their fair share of taxes instead of shifting the burden to family businesses? And what needs to be done if we want the rules of a market economy to apply for the banking sector as well? Answering the big questions that shape our economy, requires continuous political engagement. In a democracy, the power to design the money system––and the laws and institutions that govern it––is ultimately in the hands of the people. However, in practice there is a big obstacle impeding the democratic process. ‘In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates,’ wrote US financial journalist Matt Taibbi in 2009. Taibbi tried to raise awareness of the dangers of ‘financial illiteracy’. He argued that by making finance needlessly complex, the bankers transformed our democracy into a ‘two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.’ Anyone unfamiliar with the jargon of economists, bankers and tax experts is excluded from the public debate on how our monetary system should work. Why reform is necessary After every crisis, the consequences of this exclusion become visible. In the aftermath of 2009, ordinary citizens footed the bill for the bank bailouts––the US Treasury spent 420 billion dollars and European countries roughly 1.6 trillion euros (Estimated costs of bailouts by EU member state governments €1.6tn, US $426.4bn. Howarth, D., and S. James (2022). Banking Politics: Structural Reform in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Meanwhile, the bankers were negotiating the conditions of their own rescue packages and drafted future regulations. The actual power over our monetary architecture is in the hands of a small and exclusive group – often employed by, or with close ties to the financial sector. In essence, they propped up the existing banking architecture, without addressing the fundamental design flaws that make it so fragile. When former American president Barack Obama signed the new banking regulations in 2010 he said: ‘There will be no more tax-funded bailouts. Period.’ However, in 2023 the US government had to dip into the public purse again to save four large banks from bankruptcy, and prevent ‘contagion’ to the rest of the financial system. Privatizing profits while socializing risks and losses has become standard practice. The Waterworks of Money In his 2009 polemic Taibbi concluded: ‘There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.’ To put the power back into the hands of the people, we need to demystify the world of finance. With this mission in mind, we (cartographer Carlijn Kingma, investigative financial journalist Thomas Bollen, and professor New Finance Martijn van der Linden) worked for two and half years to map ‘The Waterworks of Money’, an architectural visualization of our money system that bypasses the economic jargon. Kingma spent 2300 hours drawing this map by hand, based on in-depth research and interviews with more than 100 experts––from central bank governors and board members of pension funds and banks to politicians and monetary activists. In an animated video, we walk you through a metaphorical representation of our money system, its hidden power made manifest. Only if ordinary citizens develop their own vocabulary to participate in the debate about our money system, can they tell their politicians which kind of ‘financial irrigation system’ they want. The Waterworks of Money is at the moment exhibited in Kunstmuseum Den Haag, and reproductions can be seen at the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale. For more info, see waterworksofmoney.com

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Cypherpunks MoneyBadger
by pro2rat＠yahoo.com.au 21 Jun '23

21 Jun '23

Hodl Hodl @hodlhodl · 6h Announcing a new initiative within Baltic Honeybadger: CYPHERPUNK STAGE! 🥷 This stage will be dedicated to privacy, OPSEC, freedom of speech, open source and freedom-ensuring tech. CONTENT FROM THIS STAGE WON'T BE RECORDED OR STREAMED! No photo / video allowed. https://twitter.com/hodlhodl/status/1671542550866415622?cxt=HHwWjMC-tYDGwbI… Reposts not blue Hawaiian meth but honest biker crank

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BREAKING: Ex-Goldman Banker Convicted Of Insider Trading
by Gunnar Larson 21 Jun '23

21 Jun '23

BREAKING: Ex-Goldman Banker Convicted Of Insider Trading By Stewart Bishop A former Goldman Sachs investment banker on Wednesday was convicted on insider trading charges, stemming from accusations that he passed the financial giant's confidential deal information to a close friend who secretly traded on the tips in his brother's account. https://www.law360.com/banking/articles/1691428?nl_pk=99a2a594-20ad-4b2f-a2…

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