- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

PsyOps Propaganda Kayfabe Cointelpro Dystopia 1984
by grarpamp 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

Politicians and the Bullshit of Power "Yeah, but the results of using this specific ability are what exactly? Becoming a powerful politician... Exactly, more bs. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Paper_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_generation_warfare https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783 https://psyarxiv.com/aru3f/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14747049211000317 http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/twimberley/EnviroPhilo/bullshit.pdf http://www.professorsapp.com/cohen--further-into-bullshi.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/592b5bbfd482e9898c67fd98/t/5cf95d58f… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_tale https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-ubiquitous-matrix-of-lies/ http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf https://content.psychopathcode.com/preface.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_manipulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_mongering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06580 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-08-17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_manipulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7rd04KzLcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsgWSPWX-6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf0_nMaQ6tA https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/dear-guardian-y… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot_(professional_wrestling) Wrestling discovered the unthinkable: its audience did not seem to require even a thin veneer of realism. Professional wrestling had come full circle to its honest origins by at last moving the responsibility for deception off of the shoulders of the performers and into the willing minds of the audience. -- Kayfabe “Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!” ― Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi “All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable." REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE. "Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—" YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES. "So we can believe the big ones?" YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING. "They're not the same at all!" YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED. "Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—" MY POINT EXACTLY.” ― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

2 2

BitRot BusErrors BitFlips ECC GainHits CosmicRays Corruption Collisions Floating Undefined Complexity NonStop
by grarpamp 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

Single random bit flip causes error in certificate transparency log https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/ct-policy/c/PCkKU357M2Q/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/dram-error-rates-nightmare-on-dimm-street/ https://how.complexsystems.fail/ https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/cm4/cm4-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rpi4/raspberry-pi-4-product-brief.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/linus-torvalds-blames-intel-for-lac… https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/10/bh-2011-bit-squatting-dns-hijac… https://youtu.be/aT7mnSstKGs https://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27728287 https://lwn.net/Articles/684288 https://hardwarecanucks.com/cpu-motherboard/ecc-memory-amds-ryzen-deep-dive… https://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/mcnealy-blames-ibm-for-sun-s-… https://forum.restic.net/t/troubleshooting-unreproducible-consistency-error… https://github.com/golang/go/issues/35777 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=205663 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.11245 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106388460596905072 https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/asplos15.pdf https://engineering.fb.com/2021/02/23/data-infrastructure/silent-data-corru… https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-single-switch-th… https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/calculator-hand-held-hp-41/na… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening https://www.thegamer.com/how-ionizing-particle-outer-space-helped-super-mar… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNzTUdOHm9A https://www.lanl.gov/science/NSS/issue1_2012/story4full.shtml https://blog.majid.info/telco-snooping/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/bit-rot.html https://youtu.be/i15ef618DP0

2 1

[ot] latest community news from dl
by Karl 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

This is from a bit ago. Hard to share something like this. *Belarus*. My blog post last week includes a news blast that quickly explains the situation in Belarus. I’d just like to add this week two youtube embeds that provide more information from the Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. The first is just under six minutes in length. It’s Tsikhanouskaya’s TED talk from November 2020 entitled “How to be fearless in the face of authoritarianism.” She talks about how, to lose fear of authoritarians, members of the public have to show up for each other, by supporting one another, by attending rallies, and so on. It reminds me a little of Gandhi’s autobiography, *The Story of My Experiments with Truth*, the section where Gandhi describes how there’s a threshold point where the public loses fear of being jailed. Once they no longer fear jail, great things can be accomplished. I do think the jails in India during his day were not mammoth in size and scope like U.S. prisons are today, which makes a huge tactical difference. Still, the point Tsikhanouskaya made last November is somewhat similar to Gandhi’s back then. In order to lose their fear of authoritarians, people have to be very strongly connected with each other and must stand up for themselves and others. Being strongly connected with others doesn’t necessarily mean being an extrovert or cooperating directly with others. You can be connected with others via memories, re-reading old letters, having photos of loved ones, connecting with nonhuman things such as houseplants, Nature, etc. You can collaborate indirectly as in stigmergy <https://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/stigmergy-2/>. Now, the opposite of what Tsikhanouskaya (and Gandhi) say would be the attitude a friend JG—– expressed to me several times, when he kept asking me why I find whistleblowers worth reporting on. It was along the lines of, be smart, don’t stick your neck out, that’s the only way to go through life, else prison or other bad consequences. That attitude is also expressed by a character in Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Finder.” Her novella tells of a young man with special powers who, unusually, also has a strong sense of ethics. Like his father, he works as a shipbuilder, but when he learns a ship he’s tasked to build will be used by slavers, he no longer wants to be complicit and tries to figure out a way to interfere with the ship’s construction. Yet his father warns him: “You think I can turn the King’s [work] order down? You want to see me sent to row with the slaves in the galley we’re building? Use your head, boy!” I find JG—– and the fictional father’s emphasis on “reason” and “logic” strange. Anyway, the father is pointing out a tactical concern, that if either of them disobey, they’ll be caught, and in fact, the protagonist, despite scheming a clever way through the dilemma, does get caught for disobeying. So the tactical concerns do matter. But it’s interesting how little, offline, I hear people discuss ethical dilemmas beyond what to do in quarrels with friends (which are important too). I think this is because people have become comfortable with being essentially treated like zoo animals in cages, go to paid-job, sit in desk, come home, watch television, go to bed, repeat. Inside, though, they still have a spark wanting liberation; everybody does, and it just gets suppressed to varying degrees in varying ways. So while showing people, comfortable with their cages, something like this Tsikhanouskaya TED talk, they find various ways of ignoring or changing the subject. Yet they consume fiction where, for instance, the *Star Trek: The Next Generation* crew goes around saving the day (in some episodes, anyhow). Imagine if a message of despair, pleading for rescue, came from a planet, and listening to it, Captain Picard just shrugged and said “Who cares? I’ll be in the Holodeck pretending to be a detective, fuck them” and the Enterprise starship just flies right past the pleading planet. Audiences would revolt. And yet they accept the same of themselves and each other in real life. Fiction seems to keep the spark alive, but then too often the spark doesn’t catch fire. We don’t discuss this whole topic enough, I think, in the United States. The second video is from 9 June 2021. It’s about 110 minutes long. It’s the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s hearing <https://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/us-policy-on-belarus-060921> on US Policy on Belarus. The first 60 minutes or so consist of the US ambassador to Belarus Julie Fisher talking with the foreign relations committee. From about 72 minutes in, to the end, it’s primarily Tsikhanouskaya talking with them, though some portions of the hearing focus on Radio Free Europe president and CEO Jamie Fly. It’s annoying to hear the US senators wax on, throughout the hearing, about protecting press freedom and civil liberties, when the US abridges those domestically and elsewhere so frequently, but simultaneously, the tankie position influenced by Russian state media that anything the US supports — in this case, free elections replacing the dictatorship in Belarus, Tsikhanouskaya’s chief goal — must be bad, is parochial brain damage resulting from not seeing a globe with 190+ countries and shifting alliances beyond a 1960s Cold War bipolar order, where any particular country can do horrible things and sometimes take good positions also, if only out of self-interest. It’s like: rightwingers on the northeastern Oregon airwaves insist the US is the uniquely best country; tankies insist it’s the uniquely worst country, and neither really engage with topics on their own merits. On June 21, joint sanctions were imposed <https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/100402/belarus-jo…> by the European Union, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States against the Putin-protected Belarusian dictator Lukashenka. Of course, while things look increasingly optimistic for Belarus and Tsikhanouskaya now, things might go bad in the future, but hopefully not. In the Senate hearing, Tsikhanouskaya concisely says “I would like to ask to add to the record an expanded list of suggested steps on the situation in Belarus by the US and other nations. These actions would help build up the momentum to launch a transition to elections, exactly what Belarusians demand. Otherwise, Lukashenka and other dictators around the world will feel impunity to freely break international norms to crush their opponents.” Ending impunity is the important point. My quick search didn’t turn up her expanded list of suggested steps; anybody have a link for it, if it’s available? If not, it’d make a good FOIA request. Also in the hearing, Senator Chris Coons (R-DE) asks her “I’d be interested if I might, Ms. Tsikhanouskaya, in hearing from you about how you assess the extent of Russian influence in Belarus; how exactly it’s exerted; and how Russian support of the Lukashenka regime is changing Belarusian civil society at this time.” She answers: “At the moment, the Kremlin supports Lukashenka diplomatically, politically, and, you know, financially somehow. But I have to say, we want friendly relations with all the countries, including Russia, and propaganda is trying to show us that we are against Russia but this is not true. We are against dictatorship. And it depends on the Belarusians which pathway they will choose in free and fair elections.” Her reference to a pathway might refer to the Belarus-Russia union state <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_State>, but I’m not sure. I wish she had said more, especially about that “you know, financially somehow” part! *United States* – Current legislation to repeal the 2002 AUMF. In this news blast, I’m mostly summarizing the analysis article “Are US ‘Forever Wars’ about to end? US House pushes to repeal the 2002 war authorization <https://yac.news/blogs/news/are-us-forever-wars-about-to-end-u-s-house-push…>” by YAC.news <https://yac.news/>, as well as this Defense News article <https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2021/06/24/iraq-aumf-repeal-vote-delay…> and this WaPo article <https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/06/24/authorization-military-fo…>. The US constitution gives the power to declare war to Congress. However, that power began eroding in 1991 with the Gulf War-era Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). In 2001, following 9/11, a second AUMF was passed — with only one federal legislator voting against, Barbara Lee (D-CA) — that moved the power to launch wars from Congress to the presidency, more or less completely. This legal magic was partly accomplished by reams of paperwork that changed going after terrorists from happening under a law enforcement paradigm to happening under a war paradigm; in other words, instead of arresting terrorists, they became military opponents. (Terrorists were occasionally military targets prior to 9/11, but usually they were considered law enforcement suspects, not military enemies.) In 2002, a third AUMF was passed revolving around the US plans to lead an invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a US government lie. So, three AUMFs, legally cited in the US as justification for Bush II-era electronic mass surveillance, Obama-era drone strikes, kidnappings, and torture, and Trump-era occupation of Kurdish-controlled Syrian oilfields and assassination of Iran’s top commander Qasem Soleiman. The AUMFs are the legalese-magic justification for the whole permanent war thing, where US presidents are constantly sending JSOC special forces and who knows who else (maybe these? <https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-marshals-service-personnel-dressed-as-mexi…>) into whichever country, without having to explain it to Congress (who are in theory the public’s representatives; in other words, the AUMFs provide for the White House launching secret wars without having to justify them to the US public). Some of my relatives were born shortly after 9/11, so the United States has technically been at war, often secretly, in multiple countries, against the vague noun “terror,” for their entire lives. Massive Pentagon and spy agency budgets, Congressional legislators suddenly discovering their own country has a thousand-something troops in, say, Niger, and so on. All while the public is blasted with propaganda about the need to unquestioningly worship soldiers, who agree to kill strangers based on the orders of other strangers, sometimes trusting that this will all somehow defend their loved ones, proof not much provided. So it’s pretty remarkable that earlier this month, on June 17, the US House voted on a bipartisan basis to repeal the 2002 AUMF. The 2002 AUMF is no longer relevant since the Iraq war officially ended in 2011 and the Saddam Hussein regime has not existed since 2003. The Senate is supposed to take up the matter in mid-July; here are some more details <https://email.punchbowl.news/t/ViewEmail/t/9CBA9DBEFE0B5CC72540EF23F30FEDED…> about the upcoming Senate vote, with the thorny matter being getting enough votes from Republican senators, who typically do love them some war. I’m seeing divided commentary regarding how much repealing just the 2002 AUMF, with the other two staying in force, would actually change things, but for sure it’d at minimum be a good start, if only symbolically, to reigning in the expansive and secretive White House war powers and returning to Congress the authority to declare war, meaning launching a war has to once again be debated publicly. Imagine that. [image: The colorful photo is taken from atop a hill with yellowed grass and green bushes. On this hill, a solitary green tree stands to the left. Below is the Grande Ronde valley with the different colored rectangles of agriculture. In the distance, blue mountains; above, blue sky and white clouds.]

1 0

The Hill: Marianne Williamson calls on Biden to drop efforts to extradite Assange | TheHill
by jim bell 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

The Hill: Marianne Williamson calls on Biden to drop efforts to extradite Assange | TheHill. https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/561336-marianne-williamson-calls-on-biden…

2 1

The Verge: Police ticket driver for sticking Starlink terminal on car’s hood
by jim bell 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

The Verge: Police ticket driver for sticking Starlink terminal on car’s hood. https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/2/22561264/california-driver-ticket-spacex-…

4 4

[wrong][joke][spam] popular dictator
by Karl 05 Jul '21

05 Jul '21

PD (popular dictator) walks up to the podium. "My name is Down To Earth Gal, and I am here to put the existing powers back in power." Everyone hears applause near them and applauds themselves too, figuring it is the thing to do. "I don't want to do this, but they lobby and coerce me, and they've been spending _years_ now doing that lobbying and coercing, so it's what we're going to do. Just like 4 years ago!" More applause is heard, and everyone applauds too. Some robots hand out chocolate and wine. "I have actually the names of the people and organisations who were doing the lobbying and coercing all those years, and lots of recordings of their criminal acts. Here, catch!" PD throws a box full of USB drives out among the crowd. A robot yells "Whoo!" and shoots at it with a laser. "Got that one for ya!" Other robots cheer. Some sharpshooters in the audience get into the feel of it, take out their expensive firearms, and start shooting up other evidence while it is still mid-air. Other people join in the cheering. Other people start climbing over the cheering ones to try to get at the evidence as robots move to collect it. Various drones fly in. "They totally took over every aspect of our lives, and we're going to take them down by putting them in power. I was told by a portion of my lobbiers to raise my arm excitedly and confidently now. I'll do a half raise." PD partway raises her arm and half-grins excitedly and confidently. A loud failure buzzer goes off from one robot. Another releases some canned cheers. The audience is confused. "I hear you guys have a number of rebel groups brewing, so I know we're screwed because I would only ever hear that if it were false. Onward and upwards! What do I have to say next?"

1 4

Lawfare: Rise of the Moors - 11 Accosted on Highway Travel Break, Arrested
by grarpamp 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

http://www.riseofthemoors.org/consular-affairs.html https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe-ftFU5-5on2X5zA0zAN0g https://www.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/ocywes/heavily_arme… https://v.redd.it/33heywpla0971 https://v.redd.it/4z4rulwer0971 https://v.redd.it/o3vtlv4901971 "Misleading headline. They didn’t block the highways, they were pulled over refueling their vehicles when state police noticed they were in full military gear armed with rifles and attempted a traffic stop" Expect some interesting court cases from this incident. And with all the publicity a lot more people waking and asking existential questions about the world... "What is freedom, are we really free, how can we become free?"

1 0

Distributed: Social
by grarpamp 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

https://github.com/KombuchaPrivacy/circles-ios GNU Mastodon Matrix Briar https://glue.im/glue/glue-a-social-network-that-respects-your-privacy not decentral dApps coming...

1 0

Cryptocurrency: Craig Wright Abuses Wrongness of Copyright Regime to Sham Ownership of Whitepaper
by grarpamp 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/bitcoin-creator-satoshi… https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf b1674191a88ec5cdd733e4240a81803105dc412d6c6708d53ab94fc248f4f553 https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1409605496080904195 https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1409624920145874946 https://twitter.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1410590115211223041 "A U.K. high court told Bitcoin.org it can no longer share the 2008 white paper that outlines what bitcoin is on its website," reports Business Insider, "delivering a victory to Craig Wright, a computer scientist who claimed he wrote the original document." Wright won the copyright-infringement case he brought by default, after the website's anonymous founder, known as Cobra, decided not to speak in his defense in the proceedings in London. The ruling on Monday means Bitcoin.org must take the document down from its website. It must also pay Wright £35,000 ($48,600) toward legal costs, as well as put a notice of the court's order on its website for six months, said Ontier, the law firm representing Wright... "This is an important development in Dr Wright's quest to obtain judicial vindication of his copyright in his white paper," said Simon Cohen, a senior associate at London-based Ontier... The Australian computer scientist claimed to be the original author of the white paper that was published in 2008 and describes what bitcoin is and how it works. Ontier said Wright took Cobra to court in order to prevent supporters of assets such as Bitcoin Core from using the white paper to mis-represent those assets as bitcoin... "I didn't turn up because I didn't want to expose my identity," Cobra told Insider in a tweet. Cobra shared more philosophical thoughts on Twitter: All your fiat based assets are ultimately secured by the same legal system that today made it illegal for me to host the Bitcoin whitepaper because a notorious liar swore before a judge that he's Satoshi. A system where 'justice' depends on who's got the bigger wallet. I don't think you could get a better advertisement of *why* Bitcoin is necessary than what happened today. Rules enforced through cryptography are far more superior than rules based on whoever can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in court. In later tweets he added: Sucks when you have billionaires determined to bury you in endless frivolous litigation... Normally it's the person who owes money who runs and hides, but I've repeatedly reached out to CSW to pay him his court ordered costs, and he doesn't seem to want to receive it. Perhaps he is running away from his money so he can make me in "contempt of court"?

1 0

CPUs, Cash for Compilers, Symmetric Guerrilla Nets
by grarpamp 04 Jul '21

04 Jul '21

https://github.com/geohot/twitchcore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=camQ9QeBY9Q http://homebrewcpu.com/ https://hackaday.io/project/178826-pineapple-one http://www.cburch.com/logisim/ http://pepijndevos.nl/2019/07/18/vhdl-to-pcb.html https://mgaudet.github.io/CompilerJobs/ https://compilers.iecc.com/index.phtml https://www.mgaudet.ca/technical/2019/12/10/compiler-jobs Columbia University - Data Science Institute | (Research) Software Engineer | Full/Part-time | Remote/Onsite To apply, please write to zt2297(a)columbia.edu https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/future-symmetrical-high-speed-interne…

1 0