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AP News: Growing mystery of suspected energy attacks draws US concern
by jim bell 23 May '21

23 May '21

https://apnews.com/article/health-government-and-politics-51ebd4f82664aacc5…

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Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management
by Karl 23 May '21

23 May '21

This is a random article on a current issue I bumped into. The article content appears slightly biased or misleading to me. I did not look for a less biased article. --- Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management Wed 19 May 2021 // 21:50 UTC Crown Prince and network boss Andrew Lee disputes claims made by those leaving the internet chat community Most of the volunteer staff of Freenode, an internet relay chat (IRC) network dating back to 1995, have resigned in protest over what they describe as a hostile takeover of the chat service. And many have launched an alternative service, Libera Chat. Freenode, which has focused on serving as a real-time communication channel for free and open source software projects, currently has about 76,000 users and 42,000 chat rooms. In a resignation letter, a staffer called Christian, who is also known as Fuchs on Freenode, said after 10 years helping with the network, he is leaving because he disagrees with the direction being taken by Andrew Lee, founder of VPN firm Private Internet Access (PIA), who acquired a controlling interest [PDF] in Freenode's holding company in 2017. Christian said that at the time of the 2017 transaction, the terms of the deal were not disclosed to staff, although promises were made that Lee would not have operational control over the Freenode IRC network. That apparently has changed. "The democratically elected heads of their respective teams, development, infrastructure, projects and communities were removed by force and have been informed that they are not entitled to act in their respective capacity," said Christian. "As a result, Mr Lee wants and partially has operational control over the Freenode IRC network now." In addition to Fuchs, Freenode volunteers amdj, edk, emilsp, Jess, JonathanD, Md, mniip, niko, njan, and Swant have all published resignation letters citing concern over the service's new direction or how the transition was handled. Lee, Crown Prince of the Imperial Family of Korea, told The Register in an email it was unfortunate the former Freenode staffers resigned, and took issue with various claims by former staffers that he characterized as false. Christel Dahlskjaer, the former head of Freenode's staff who transferred her interest in Freenode Limited to Lee, resigned in March. Dahlskjaer, with the help of Richard “RichiH” Hartmann, took over Freenode after project originator Rob Levin (lilo) died in a traffic accident in 2006 and Levin’s brother tried to turn the project into business. She was an employee of PIA at the time of the Freenode Limited transaction. Lee in an online post has attributed her resignation to "persistent harassment" from a team overseen by tomaw, who subsequently become embroiled in a legal dispute over administrative control of the Freenode domain name. Aaron Jones (amdj), a Freenode staffer who just resigned, disputes this in his resignation letter. "I was a first-hand observer to her departure," Jones wrote. "This is entirely false. She left us with a 14-paragraph e-mail about it, and signed off with us on good terms at the time." It's been suggested that Dahlskjaer, just prior to her departure, supported adding a Shells.com affiliate link to Freenode's website, steering affiliate ad revenue to a company co-founded by Lee, and that other Freenode staffers disagreed with that decision. Lee however said that claims by some departing staffers about the Shells links are incorrect. "I have had logos for my companies on Freenode since 2013, and the staff was absolutely in approval of it," he said. In his note to The Register, Lee said: I have been providing financial and infrastructural sponsorship, through one of my companies, to Freenode for the past 8 years. While it had been discussed previously, Christel reached out in 2017 asking if I would be willing to acquire the company and fund it more dramatically. Given the fact that I love IRC and have been supportive of Freenode for so many years, I obliged. Unfortunately, Christel resigned from Freenode in March and we did not appoint a new head of staff immediately after. Thus, the most senior staff member took the role and asked us for ownership of the domain. My response, to this, was a suggestion to decentralize Freenode, as I felt it was too important for the community. However, immediately after this, my access to the domain account was revoked. As such, I began to request access back to no avail, which some former staffers perceived as me attempting to make a hostile takeover. I'm not sure how this could have been the case however, because I was listed as the owner both on the Freenode website, on blog posts and on the UK Companies House list. This subsequently ended up becoming a slander campaign toward me. It is unfortunate, but I also appreciate the passion toward the free and open source software movement. Since then, we have regained control (as we always had) of Freenode and are planning to have a productive discussion with the most senior staff member sometime this week, as we have both agreed to speak. The Register spoke with a resigned Freenode staffer who suggested Dahlskjaer's departure may be attributable to other life priorities, given that she'd been with the project for years. The Freenode volunteer who spoke with us said that something like 20 to 30 of the network's volunteers have resigned, though tomaw has not at this point. The former staffer we spoke to described the dispute as a consequence of the unexpected shift from self-governance to being under active management. When people are given autonomy and "someone changes it and says the land you're standing on is mine, that's very jarring," the individual said. "This is about control and a person who didn't have a role in the community." Slack cuts ties to IRC and XMPP, cos they don't speak Emoji Freenode IRC users told to change passwords after securo-breach Which Linux admin tools and tricks would YOU stake your career on? IRC botnets dying off The departures come at a difficult time for Freenode, one of the few IRC networks to have survived so long. The former Freenode staffer said that while the network managed to thrive over the years as other IRC communities lost users, it's no longer growing because recently chat services like Slack and Discord have hurt Freenode participation. The Register understands that Libera Chat has had about 150 requests from projects to establish IRC channels on the network. These won’t necessarily end the presence of these channels on Freenode — projects may be hedging their bets about Freenode's long-term survival. Having said that, the Ubuntu IRC Council has voted to migrate away from Freenode. Lee, however, sounds undaunted. "Freenode is back in control of Freenode Limited, where it always was," he said. "In the end, what's most important to everyone is the survival of Freenode and the FOSS community – and I think since that's where we are all aligned, it will survive." ® Updated to add Lee has now added a more detailed explanation, including messaging content [PDF] of his side of the story. He says he wants to correct some inaccuracies that came out and hopes to woo people back to Freenode.

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*SPAM* Fauci admits to Politifact that Wuhan Lab Theory Probable [After Year and a Half of refusing to admit to such]
by Se7en 23 May '21

23 May '21

Spam detection software, running on the system "mail.pglaf.org", has identified this incoming email as possible spam. The original message has been attached to this so you can view it or label similar future email. If you have any questions, see the administrator of that system for details. Content preview: <https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fauci-not-convinced-covid-19-developed -naturally> -- |-----/ | Se7en / The One and Only! | se7en(a)cock.email / | 0x0F83F93882CF6116 / | https://se7en-site.neocities.org Content analysis details: (4.8 points, 4.0 required) pts rule name description ---- ---------------------- -------------------------------------------------- -1.9 BAYES_00 BODY: Bayes spam probability is 0 to 1% [score: 0.0001] -0.0 SPF_HELO_PASS SPF: HELO matches SPF record 1.3 RCVD_IN_BL_SPAMCOP_NET RBL: Received via a relay in bl.spamcop.net [Blocked - see <https://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?37.120.193.122>] 0.0 URIBL_BLOCKED ADMINISTRATOR NOTICE: The query to URIBL was blocked. See http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/DnsBlocklists#dnsbl-block for more information. [URIs: cock.email] 3.3 RCVD_IN_PBL RBL: Received via a relay in Spamhaus PBL [37.120.193.122 listed in zen.spamhaus.org] 1.3 RCVD_IN_VALIDITY_RPBL RBL: Relay in Validity RPBL, https://senderscore.org/blocklistlookup/ [37.120.193.122 listed in bl.score.senderscore.com] 0.0 T_SPF_PERMERROR SPF: test of record failed (permerror) -0.1 DKIM_VALID_AU Message has a valid DKIM or DK signature from author's domain -0.1 DKIM_VALID Message has at least one valid DKIM or DK signature 0.1 DKIM_SIGNED Message has a DKIM or DK signature, not necessarily valid 0.8 RDNS_NONE Delivered to internal network by a host with no rDNS The original message was not completely plain text, and may be unsafe to open with some email clients; in particular, it may contain a virus, or confirm that your address can receive spam. If you wish to view it, it may be safer to save it to a file and open it with an editor.

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The Conversation US: Zero-trust security: Assume that everyone and everything on the internet is out to get you – and maybe already has
by jim bell 22 May '21

22 May '21

The Conversation US: Zero-trust security: Assume that everyone and everything on the internet is out to get you – and maybe already has. https://theconversation.com/zero-trust-security-assume-that-everyone-and-ev…

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[semi-spam] sdr struggles continue
by Karl 22 May '21

22 May '21

I am so excited that I got to work on my shielding testing ideas a little bit more! The gnuradio qt block "time raster" is really inspiring. Given a packetlength it aligns the data along that length, so it can be used for visualising unknown packet signals like clocked refresh emissions. I dunno where I'm supposed to learn that but I didn't know about this block for years and years. Of course I am using it for developing "noiscillate" which is my personal project for measuring shielding effectiveness without a high quality radio. Long ago, before schizophrenia, I could complete something like this within a few weeks, so it is very confusing to me for it be taking years and years, and I'm not sure that I'm making the right decisions around it. One high quality radio my father gave me long ago I don't know where is, the other one is a N210 I got to test the new wideband scanning research people were linking back and forth a bit ago. Unfortunately I don't have a daughterboard for my N210 yet, and it doesn't look like something I should try to figure out how to afford until next month. Still, it's cool you can purchase the radio in parts like that. It seems ridiculous to me, as a lifelong hobby algorithm researcher, to require an expensive radio with an fpga, to implement a sample algorithm, when computers have massive gpus nowadays and common math libraries to use them. I'm sad the researchers implemented their algorithm on an fpga, making it harder for people to use. But I imagine it is how they were trained, from before using gpus for math was common. Probably makes it much easier to work with massively high sample rates, which the N210 nicely provides. I'm currently rebuilding gnuradio. Somehow my "debug" build folder got reconfigured for "release" before I last installed it. I'm now getting a crash in the library whenever I run some graph containing a receiver block, and there are no symbols to debug it with. The form of noiscillate is simple and I've mentioned it before on the list, but it's very hard for me to physically reach my work and cognitively go through the motions of continuing it. I appreciate the stability offered by gnuradio blocks, where if I clean my block up enough I could share it with the gnuradio tree, giving future people something to stumble upon if I fail to continue my small work.

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BELL's AP theory refuted
by professor rat 22 May '21

22 May '21

Jim Bell thought he could steal the anarchist concept called ' propaganda of the deed ' and pass it off as his own genius idea just by transfer to the ( then new ) internet. To demonstrate the bad-faith involved in this exercise its enough to see how much Freudian claptrap he quotes in support of this bullshit. So he's just another in a long line of carpetbagging opportunists - like Hughes and Mongo - and an inspiration for Royal scumbags like Julian Assmange and Craig Wright. Its good he's in poor health now and will soon be dead. Good riddance to fake revolutionaries.

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ZDNet: Quantum Key Distribution could seal the 5G rift with China, say engineers
by jim bell 22 May '21

22 May '21

ZDNet: Quantum Key Distribution could seal the 5G rift with China, say engineers. https://www.zdnet.com/article/quantum-key-distribution-could-seal-the-5g-ri…

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Re: more email blocking/censorship.
by juan 21 May '21

21 May '21

I'm posting this on-list to make sure Shawn sees my reply. I replied to him directly but I don't know if the heliohost.us --> rushpost.com path works. As another datapoint, last week part(I think) of heliohost.us got banned by google, and if I send a message to gmail.com I do get a 'message can't be delivered' bla bla reply. I was also told that the bans eventually clear, though I have my doubts. On Fri, 21 May 2021 10:33:54 -0500 "Shawn K. Quinn" <skquinn(a)rushpost.com> wrote: > On 5/20/21 21:20, juan wrote: > > > > > > I sent a message from punks(a)tfwno.gf to gbnewby(a)petascale.org (which I believe goes through gmail) and another message to karl and apparently they didn't get them which leads me to believe that cock.li messages are now being discarded by google/sent to gmail's spam folder or something? > > Gmail to cock.li (firemail.cc) works for me. Cock.li to Gmail hasn't > gone through yet after several minutes (nothing in spam folder). hotmail shows the same behaviour. Hotmail to cock.li works. Cock.li to hotmail messages are silently discarded. > > If this is intentional on the part of Google, it's absolutely despicable. kinda looks like there is one 'shared' blocking list and it's being used by pg's spam filter, it's being used by google, and...the rest of the arpanet prolly.

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Ars Technica: Vulnerabilities in billions of Wi-Fi devices let hackers bypass firewalls
by jim bell 21 May '21

21 May '21

Ars Technica: Vulnerabilities in billions of Wi-Fi devices let hackers bypass firewalls. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/farewell-to-firewalls-wi-fi-bugs-op…

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Science X: Bell's theorem refuted
by jim bell 21 May '21

21 May '21

Science X: Bell's theorem refuted. https://sciencex.com/news/2021-05-bell-theorem-refuted.html "Different Bell".

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