- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Dark Sun
by professor rat 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Privacy Browser Brave Expands Beyond Ethereum to Solana Brave and Solana Labs today announced a joint integration which will see the privacy browser add support for Solana wallets early next year https://decrypt.co/85538/privacy-browser-brave-expands-beyond-ethereum-sola…

1 0

Happy Birthday Aaron Swartz
by zeynepaydogan 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/12/aaron-swartz-heroism-… The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz [Glenn Greenwald](https://www.theguardian.com/profile/glenn-greenwald) Aaron Swartz, the computer programmer and internet freedom activist,[committed suicide on Friday](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/technology/aaron-swartz-internet-… New York at the age of 26. As the incredibly moving remembrances from his friends such as[Cory Doctorow](http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html)and[Larry Lessig](http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully)attest, he was unquestionably brilliant but also - like most everyone - a complex human being plagued by demons and flaws. For many reasons, I don't believe in whitewashing someone's life or beatifying them upon death. But, to me, much of Swartz's tragically short life was filled with acts that are genuinely and, in the most literal and noble sense, heroic. I think that's really worth thinking about today. At the age of 14, Swartz played a key role in developing the RSS software that is still widely used to enable people to manage what they read on the internet. As a teenager, he also played a vital role in the creation of Reddit, the wildly popular social networking news site. When Conde Nast purchased Reddit, Swartz received a substantial sum of money at a very young age. He became something of a legend in the internet and programming world before he was 18. His path to internet mogul status and the great riches it entails was clear, easy and virtually guaranteed: a path which so many other young internet entrepreneurs have found irresistible, monomaniacally devoting themselves to making more and more money long after they have more than they could ever hope to spend. Advertisement But rather obviously, Swartz had little interest in devoting his life to his own material enrichment, despite how easy it would have been for him. As Lessig wrote: "Aaron had literally done nothing in his life 'to make money' . . . Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good." Specifically, he committed himself to the causes in which he so passionately believed: internet freedom, civil liberties, making information and knowledge as available as possible.[Here he is](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=… his May, 2012 keynote address at the Freedom To Connect conference discussing the role he played in stopping SOPA, the[movie-industry-demanded legislation](http://www.salon.com/2012/01/18/chris_dodds_paid_sopa_crusadin… would have vested the government with dangerous censorship powers over the internet. Critically, Swartz didn't commit himself to these causes merely by talking about them or advocating for them. He repeatedly sacrificed his own interests, even his liberty, in order to defend these values and challenge and subvert the most powerful factions that were their enemies. That's what makes him, in my view, so consummately heroic. In 2008, Swartz[targeted Pacer](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html), the online service that provides access to court documents for a per-page fee. What offended Swartz and others was that people were forced to pay for access to public court documents that were created at public expense. Along with a friend, Swartz created a program to download millions of those documents and then, as Doctorow wrote, "spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain." For that act of civil disobedience, he was investigated and harassed by the FBI, but never charged. But in July 2011, Swartz[was arrested](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/us/20compute.html?)for allegedly targeting JSTOR, the online publishing company that digitizes and distributes scholarly articles written by academics and then sells them, often at a high price, to subscribers. As[Maria Bustillos detailed](http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing), none of the money goes to the actual writers (usually professors) who wrote the scholarly articles - they are usually not paid for writing them - but instead goes to the publishers. This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data activists) for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America's colleges and universities. The indictment filed against Swartz alleged that he used his access as a Harvard fellow to the JSTOR system to download millions of articles with the intent to distribute them online for free; when he was detected and his access was cut off, the indictment claims he then trespassed into an MIT computer-wiring closet in order to physically download the data directly onto his laptop. Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never intended to profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the company's "terms of service" by making the articles available to the public. Once arrested, he returned all copies of everything he downloaded and vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes. But federal prosecutors ignored the wishes of the alleged "victims". Led by[a federal prosecutor in Boston](http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/12/30/… for her overzealous prosecutions, the DOJ threw the book at him, charging Swartz with multiple felonies which carried a total sentence of several decades in prison and $1 million in fines. Swartz's trial on these criminal charges was scheduled to begin in two months. He adamantly refused to plead guilty to a felony because he did not want to spend the rest of his life as a convicted felon with all the stigma and rights-denials that entails. The criminal proceedings, as Lessig put it, already put him in a predicament where "his wealth [was] bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge." To say that the DOJ's treatment of Swartz was excessive and vindictive is an extreme understatement. When I[wrote about Swartz's plight last August](http://www.salon.com/2011/08/19/surveillance_13/), I wrote that he was "being prosecuted by the DOJ with obscene over-zealousness". Timothy Lee wrote[the definitive article in 2011](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/feds-go-overboard-in-prose… why, even if all the allegations in the indictment are true, the only real crime committed by Swartz was basic trespassing, for which people are punished, at most, with 30 days in jail and a $100 fine, about which Lee wrote: "That seems about right: if he's going to serve prison time, it should be measured in days rather than years." Nobody knows for sure why federal prosecutors decided to pursue Swartz so vindictively, as though he had committed some sort of major crime that deserved many years in prison and financial ruin.[Some theorized](http://www.theawl.com/2011/08/was-aaron-swartz-stealing)that the DOJ hated him for his serial activism and civil disobedience. Others speculated that, as Doctorow put it, "the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them." I believe it has more to do with what I told the New York Times' Noam Cohen for[an article he wrote](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/business/media/aaron-swartzs-web-a… Swartz's case. Swartz's activism, I argued, was waged as part of one of the most vigorously contested battles - namely, the war over how the internet is used and who controls the information that flows on it - and that was his real crime in the eyes of the US government: challenging its authority and those of corporate factions to maintain a stranglehold on that information. In that above-referenced speech on SOPA, Swartz discussed the grave dangers to internet freedom and free expression and assembly posed by the government's efforts to control the internet with expansive interpretations of copyright law and other weapons to limit access to information. That's a major part of why I consider him heroic. He wasn't merely sacrificing himself for a cause. It was a cause of supreme importance to people and movements around the world - internet freedom - and he did it by knowingly confronting the most powerful state and corporate factions because he concluded that was the only way to achieve these ends. Suicide is an incredibly complicated phenomenon. I didn't know Swartz nearly well enough even to form an opinion about what drove him to do this; I had a handful of exchanges with him online in which we said nice things about each other's work and I truly admired him. I'm sure even his closest friends and family are struggling to understand exactly what caused him to defy his will to live by taking his own life. t, despite his public and[very sad writings](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick)about battling depression, it only stands to reason that a looming criminal trial that could send him to prison for decades played some role in this; even if it didn't, this persecution by the DOJ is an outrage and an offense against all things decent, for the reasons Lessig wrote today: > "Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The 'property' Aaron had 'stolen', we were told, was worth 'millions of dollars' — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed. > > "A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don't get both, you don't deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you. > > "For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to 'justice' never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled 'felons'." Whatever else is true, Swartz was destroyed by a "justice" system that fully protects the most egregious criminals as long as they are members of or useful to the nation's most powerful factions, but punishes with incomparable mercilessness and harshness those who lack power and, most of all, those who challenge power. Swartz knew all of this. But he forged ahead anyway. He could have easily opted for a life of great personal wealth, status, prestige and comfort. He chose instead to fight - selflessly, with conviction and purpose, and at great risk to himself - for noble causes to which he was passionately devoted. That, to me, isn't an example of heroism; it's the embodiment of it, its purest expression. It's the attribute our country has been most lacking. I always found it genuinely inspiring to watch Swartz exude this courage and commitment at such a young age. His death had better prompt some serious examination of the DOJ's behavior - both in his case and its warped administration of justice generally. But his death will also hopefully strengthen the inspirational effects of thinking about and understanding the extraordinary acts he undertook in his short life. From the[official statement of Swartz's family](http://soupsoup.tumblr.com/post/40373383323/official-statement-from…: > "Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts US Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles." This sort of unrestrained prosecutorial abuse is, unfortunately, far from uncommon. It usually destroys people without attention or notice. Let's hope - and work to ensure that - the attention generated by Swartz's case prompts some movement toward accountability and reform.

1 0

First-ever fully encrypted social platform to preserve users /creators’ privacy at all times?
by professor rat 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Or just mo Vaporware? https://dailyhodl.com/2021/11/05/creaton-aims-to-become-the-decentralized-a… We report - you deride

1 0

[spam][personal][crazy] Trying to Build Bitcoin from Source
by Karl 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Bitcoin is like using the blood of the devil to escape hell. It's a very powerful reagent but produces strange things around you, like fires and torture, and your chemotherapist may have bad things to tell you about your soul. Or wait, is that something else that does that, other than cryptocurrency? Maybe telling people what you're doing on the internet? Anyway, I'll try more to build bitcoin. It's 15:17 EDT and I'm booting up a terminal in X. Okay, I've got my tmux session loaded. The current issue that when i run bitcoind, it throws an allocation error trying to allocate a randomly huge number of bytes long string, inside boost::filesystem. I've just built boost with debug-symbols=on to see if I can find the problem. It's 15:20 EDT. I'm installing a locally built version of boost 77. I recall I already tried this, and that gcc shows no debug symbols, dunno. Right now my install command is for some reason trying to rebuild everything that was just built. I guess I'll let it finish configuring and see if it gets anywhere. It's 15:21 and i just restarted my boost configuration. BLARGH! This is an expression. it goes "blargh". It means "things are happy and joyous in the world I am imagining. Wouldn't you like things to be this way outside imagination?" [added later, see below: part of me thought this was maybe a bad idea to share, maybe skip it, uncertain:]It was pretty hard the past two days to do that libusb thing, and left me in a new state of mind.[end of maybe-bad-idea-to-share, tagging added later, see below] Ok. Boost intsalled. I'll quick try the debug thing again, then look for the libraries that are missing debug symbols, and troubleshoot why. 15:23 . My bits are saying it is inappropriate to share the "It was pretty hard the past ..." . It's 15:24 . The reason I write every tiny thing is because I was brainwashed to never tell anybody about what happened to me, or how, or store any evidence about it, or log experiences that help me understand it, or process it, or put an eeg on my head, or talk to doctors about my issues, or store records of what i do or what others say to me, etc etc etc etc. So, I have spent the past 8 years beating my well-helmeted head against a wall in attempts to preserve the most basic information about my life in order to live it at all, and have suffered extreme memory issues as my worse dissociated parts have struggled to stop this from happening ... and it is thus a huge celebration whenever some shred of information of my thought processes can be preserved in some kind of vaguely temporary record for more than 30 seconds. So, maybe the share was a bad idea, I dunno, every feeling-bit has its own wisdom. I'll go up and mark it that. [goes up and does this, it's 15:26] [i'm back, it's 15:27]. One project I'd really enjoy would be hacking a vnc-like thing to replay desktop sessions. That'd be nice. One of my parts is hitting me harder due to my desire to preserve even dangerous information. It's 15:27 and my gdb is not pausing when the exception I want to debug is thrown. In fact, it is producing a different error that I resolved earlier. Maybe I made an error building boost. It's 15:28 and i have two things that are logically simple and psychologically very difficult, to debug! Here's a monologue: meanie: karl, you are trying to preserve information, you know this is evil, we will now torture you defender: karl is good. you are bad. do not hurt him. hurting is bad. preserving is good. meanie: let me help you out a little bit. okay, technically preserving is _logically_ considered good, and hurting _logically_ considered bad, but karl and i have a relationship where occasionally i hurt him when he preserves information. defender: get back here and help us try to preserve stuff! is bitcoin a good way to do that? i dunno, but i'm trying to compile bitcoin right now. maybe this would be easier in a chroot of a system similar to one the devs use. meanie: please use the binary. mostly because it makes this faster, and because it helps me know i have another avenue to compromise your client with in ways that are hard to debug. but honestly, using the binary is so much faster and easier. karl: i probably don't have a compatible glibc for the binary, but it is another avenue, although i hear it might be more dangerous, not sure. meanie: all the hackers are gone, why are you here karl: i think i'm here because you were scared i might come here on my own, and wanted ot make sure you were in charge of it, not sure meanie: cypherpunks list? oh. right. kill all the hacktivists. death to hacktivists! karl: exactly! meanie: death to hacktivists? that can't be right. is this a trick? we're trying to build bitcoin, but instead typing random things obsessively. things that aren't random, but are very strange for a mailing list. so this new old issue (it's 15:32) .... um .... i don't expect it to happen because it is resolved by a preprocessor symbol that is correctly being defined. # ./b2 define=BOOST_FILESYSTEM_DISABLE_STATX debug-symbols=on install maybe i'll try "clean install" buuuuuuut that could take a long time, during which i could forget i'm doing this hmm. 15:34 . i'll re-debug the statx issue. i've come back to this email without reason, when i am trying to debug an issue on my computer. i'll send the email and use the browser without plan. it's 15:34

3 12

Re the Batshit crazy trolling moron's religious bigotry
by professor rat 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

" . . . punk, so you know, i consider many of the replies i receive from your email address to be spam this is because i am receiving expressions that appear to say the same thing repeatedly without regard to the context of what they are replying to, such as calling everything a government effort of the pentagon, or describing everything as part of a plan by jewish-ethnic people to wield power . . . " Objection - Jewish-ethnic people assumes facts not in evidence.

3 2

How blockchain technology will bring triple-A games to metaverses
by professor rat 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-blockchain-technology-might-bring-triple… Grand Theft Crypto - relaunched Grand theft crypto is an F-box game engine from the the underground game-crew that bought you President Evil, Castle Wolfensen, Plane Murder and Doctor Rat. In stores for Christmas this game is a combination role-playing first peon shooter in a close but separate reality. Some revolutionary software has been stolen by the last-empire, a military/industrial combine thats taking over the planet. Targeting dissidents and code rebels stormtroopers of the empire are similar to 1st generation OCP robocops, while high up positions in the empire have been favored by players in field tests, the survival and resistance tactics and strategy of the rebels win over longer term players as they delve into the multi-verse world of 2006. Ricomended.

1 0

Re: Iraqi prime minister survives assassination attempt with armed drones
by professor rat 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Bannon - Bell Synchronicities Inside prison, mostly 2010-2012, I read not only Frank Herbert's Dune, and all its sequels, but also all of Herbert's son's Dune prequels as well. Jim Bell https://www.google.com/search?q=Trump+Harkonnen&client=opera&hs=Qdh&tbm=isc…

1 0

Cryptocurrency: Coin Privacy - Wake The Fuck Up
by grarpamp 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Listen Here: https://www.monerotalk.live/chris-sky-the-power-of-united-non-compliance-an… Watch Here (YT): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ej5oVNEtvo Watch Here (Odysee): https://odysee.com/@MoneroTalk:8 BTC Maxi's STILL refusing to add real coin privacy to Bitcoin. As USA etc becomes mining and staking capital of world, all your transactions will be blocked by US GovCorp law and whim. This is obvious in recent GovCorp strategies, and intentional. Atomic Swaps, Cross-Coin DEX, Privacy Capable Coins, Overlay Network Plugins. Adopt them now, or lose all your [Monetary] Freedom.

1 0

Aaron Van Wirdum and Adam Back's extreme racism on display
by professor rat 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

Aaron sez Mongo saw C-punks as similar to the Black Panthers. And Back's silence might be taken for assent. This level of list revisionism could give any casual observer whiplash. Far closer to the truth to say May was a ' fascist " ( Jake Appelbaum ) and those who cover for him may be assumed to share his Nazi-like views on ' Mud People ". Such lies will not stand - and these two will pay dearly for this.

1 0

New York Post: MIT alums: We can’t support a school that caved to woke mentality
by jim bell 08 Nov '21

08 Nov '21

MIT alums: We can’t support a school that caved to woke mentality https://nypost.com/2021/11/07/mit-alums-we-cant-support-a-school-that-caved… Jim Bell's comment: I graduated from MIT in 1980.I agree 100%. MIT is apparently going nuts with "woke" nonsense.

1 0