- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

WEF Cyber Polygon: Corporate Game Sim, Prelude re Corona Event 201, CBDC WarOnCash Cryptocurrency
by grarpamp 11 Apr '21

11 Apr '21

"It’s interesting how simulations, trial runs, and mock attacks often seem to precede actual events." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUb66PZ5EgY Corbett: Catherine Fitts - You will be cancelled https://www.theorganicprepper.com/cyberattack-simulation/ https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/02/investigative-reports/from-event-201-t… https://2020.cyberpolygon.com/results-2020/ https://www.weforum.org/press/2019/10/live-simulation-exercise-to-prepare-p… https://www.theorganicprepper.com/clade-x-virus-kill-900-million-people/ https://www.businessinsider.com/pandemic-virus-simulation-johns-hopkins-sho… https://www.weforum.org/projects/cyber-polygon https://www.sberbank.ru/en/individualclients https://bi.zone/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income Is 2021's Fictional Cyberattack Simulation Prepping Us For A Cyber Pandemic? Authored by Robert Wheeler via The Organic Prepper blog, Many readers are aware of a simulation conducted by the World Economic Forum called Event 201 that preceded the COVID pandemic. Event 201 eerily described and seemed to predict the pandemic. (There was also a pandemic simulation called Clade X that preceded Covid.) What some readers may not know, however, is that the World Economic Forum conducted a similar simulation, Cyber Polygon 2020. This 2020 event also predicted a global catastrophe. A new cyberattack simulation, Cyber Polygon, will occur in July 2021. The WEF, Russia’s Sberbank, and its cybersecurity subsidiary BIZONE announced in February that a new cyberattack simulation would occur July 9, 2021. The event will simulate a supply-chain cyberattack similar to the SolarWinds attack that would “assess the cyber resilience” of the exercise participants. >From the Article written by Whitney Webb and Johnny Vedmore, “From Event 201 To Cyber Polygon: The WEF’s Simulation Of A Coming Cyber Pandemic” : The exercise comes several months after the WEF, the “international organization for public-private cooperation” that counts the world’s richest elite among its members, formally announced its movement for a Great Reset, which would involve the coordinated transition to a Fourth Industrial Revolution global economy in which human workers become increasingly irrelevant. This revolution, including its biggest proponent, WEF founder Klaus Schwab, has previously presented a major problem for WEF members and member organizations in terms of what will happen to the masses of people left unemployed by the increasing automation and digitalization in the workplace. New economic systems that are digitally based and either partnered with or run by central banks are a key part of the WEF’s Great Reset, and such systems would be part of the answer to controlling the masses of the recently unemployed. As others have noted, these digital monopolies, not just financial services, would allow those who control them to “turn off” a person’s money and access to services if that individual does not comply with certain laws, mandates and regulations. How do the event coordinators describe Cyber Polygon 2021? The newly updated event website, Cyber Polygon 2021, ominously warns as the world is more interconnected and global digitalization accelerates “a single vulnerable link is enough to bring down the entire system, just like the domino effect. A secure approach to digital development today will determine the future of humanity for decades to come.” >From the World Economic Forum site: What is Cyber Polygon? Cyber Polygon is a unique cybersecurity event that combines the world’s largest technical training exercise for corporate teams and an online conference featuring senior officials from international organisations and leading corporations. Cyber Polygon in 2021 This year discussions during the live-streamed conference will centre on secure development of ecosystems. With global digitalisation further accelerating and people, companies, and countries becoming ever more interconnected, security of every single element of a supply-chain is key to ensuring the sustainability of the whole system. During the technical exercise, participants will hone their practical skills in mitigating a targeted supply chain attack on a corporate ecosystem in real time. Crises seem to conveniently arise when the people in power want change. All this ties right into Universal Basic Income. The very popular UBI, introduced with even more vigor after the COVID 19 pandemic, has popularized consistent “stimulus payments” to survive the crisis. The idea of the UBI has been thrown around as a solution to poverty for some time, with bloggers like Daisy Luther comparing it to modern-day feudalism. With the building blocks of the technological control grid already in place, adding a UBI forms a relatively strong foundation. The WEF has settled on the model of “stakeholder capitalism.” In name and theory, it appears to be an inclusive type of capitalism. However, it would essentially merge the public and private sectors, which would, as Webb and Vedmore write, create “a system much more like Mussolini’s corporatist style of fascism than anything else.” To get to that point, however, the current system must collapse. Its replacement society will be successfully marketed to the general population as being better than its predecessor. “When the world’s most powerful people, such as members of the WEF,” write Webb and Vedmore, “desire to make radical changes, crises conveniently emerge—whether a war, a plague, or economic collapse—that enable a “reset” of the system, which is frequently accompanied by a massive upward transfer of wealth.” Is there a possible warming of international relations with Russia? What’s also notable about the upcoming simulation is Russia’s inclusion as a leader of such an important global event. If there is a real cyberattack that disables and disrupts a large portion of the global financial system, who will be blamed? Is the overused Russian hacker narrative coming to an end? The answer to that question might be the final nail in the coffin of anything resembling a free society. How do we prepare for a real cyberattack? Many of you would probably rather not wait for a fictional simulation to tell you how to prepare for this. Here’s what you need to know about them and how to prepare for a cyber attack. Cyber attacks are a growing risk, experts say, with some even suggesting that cyber warfare will be the battleground of the future. It’s interesting how simulations, trial runs, and mock attacks often seem to precede actual events.

1 0

Censorship: Kiwi Farms Josh on Section 230 CDA, Cryptocurrency, MATCH Secret Credit Card Banking Blacklists
by grarpamp 11 Apr '21

11 Apr '21

https://madattheinternet.com/2021/04/07/section-230-isnt-the-problem-paymen… https://kiwifarms.net/ http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion/ http://kiwifarms6v775u6.onion/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://encyclopediadramatica.wiki/index-php/Kiwi_Farms https://kiwifarms.net/threads/exploration-of-international-options.85614/ "I am seeking legal advice regarding 8 different European countries regarding the viability of foreign markets for hosting the forum. -- KiwiFarms" https://reclaimthenet.org/dick-masterson-new-project-2-mastercard/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfBorgoYQa4 MATCH Secret Credit Blacklist https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2021/nr-occ-2021-8.html https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2021/nr-occ-2021-14.html https://archive.is/A2KZ8 https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/index.html https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/ Section 230 Isn't The Problem, Payment Networks Are Authored by 'Josh' via MadAtTheInternet.com Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history. Passed into law in 1996, it has overseen the entirety of the consumer Internet’s development. Its premise is simple: Internet service providers and platform operators are not responsible for civil damages that result from user-generated content that they host or manage. These protections are why the United States is the first choice for hosting any digital service. Without them, the entire world would suffer a less free Internet. I have operated a controversial website called the Kiwi Farms for 8 years and was featured in ZeroHedge in 2019 after telling New Zealand police I would not be surrendering my user’s information to them. My website thrives and doubles in size each year, primarily thanks to Section 230. I can allow my users to say almost anything they want without having to worry about being sued for what they say. Without these essential protections, I would not be able to host in the United States. Unfortunately, Section 230 has been defamed as the reason Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al behave the way they do. This is not true. These businesses censor because they have personal motivations to do so. More importantly, they have financial motivations to do so. I hope to convince a reasonable person that: Payment networks must be regulated to give fair access. Section 230 is essential and modifying it harms online speech. Big tech does not need Section 230, but you do. You should learn how to use cryptocurrencies right now. The payment networks are more powerful than big tech. Without the consent of all four major payment networks to stay in business, even mighty tech giants are vulnerable to lose billions of dollars in revenue. The various agreements enforced by the four major payment networks (MasterCard, Visa, Amex, and Discover) impose rules that any business wanting to exist in the digital economy must obey. Not all these rules are written. The big payment networks like to stay out of the public eye. They avoid attention by using blacklists which they claim only banks can add to, but which they manage and share. You also never deal with the payment network directly. An eCommerce site passes your credit card information to a “payment gateway”, which is plugged into a “payment processor”, and that payment processor handles communications with the payment networks. Each of these are usually different companies. When you get banned from processing payments, you are told so by your payment gateway or payment processor, but the decision can come from much higher up. If it were, you’d be lucky to find out. Consider a company like Patreon. They are an online crowdfunding service which handles donations from many supporters to many online content creators. Patreon has its own rules, uses Stripe as a payment gateway and payment processor, agrees to Stripe’s terms of service, and then Stripe coordinates with all major payment networks which each have their own set of agreements. That means every creator on Patreon must obey six different sets of rules. If the gateway were its own company, it would be seven. It is no wonder so many people get banned, as only the most tepid and inoffensive content creators could hope to meet so many different standards! Patreon must keep Stripe happy to stay in business, and Stripe must keep all four payment networks happy to stay in business. If any one of MasterCard, Visa, Amex, or Discover pass a rule, then it affects the entire downstream ecosystem. If Discover (5% of the market) says an industry or behavior is prohibited, then Stripe must enforce that rule on all the merchants on their service (even merchants who do not process Discover). If Discover were to cut ties with Stripe, then Stripe would lose at least 5% of their transactions over night and any merchants who do want to process Discover cards. That is a large and dramatic blow to any company operating on small margins. I do not claim it is MasterCard’s fault that Twitter banned Trump. I am sure Twitter makes many stupid decisions all on its own. The problem is that these rules—how they are enforced, the secrecy in which they are enforced, and unappealable finality of these decisions—stifle competition. Startups like Gab quickly find themselves told they are not allowed to make money. This problem has never existed before on the scale that it does now. This phenomenon transcends the type of startup. All alt-tech is trodden upon equally. Patreon competitor New Project 2 was first banned from a payment processor at the demand of Discover, then after finding a new payment processor was put on MATCH (the MasterCard blocklist), prohibiting the company from ever finding another payment processor. If Dick Masterson (the owner of NP2) made a new company to try and get around MATCH for the purpose of continuing NP2, he would very likely find his person on that blocklist directly, ending all his businesses at once. These blocklists, and the risk management factors which decide who goes on them, are “trade secrets” and you cannot even sue to figure out why you were added to them. New Project 2 was blacklisted for “Violation of Standards”, which prohibits it from even using so-called high-risk processors. Nobody knows what “Violation of Standards” means. Dick only found some details of New Project 2’s blacklisting because he called the banks and annoyed the right people for days until they reluctantly admitted who was actually at fault. Payment networks claim they do not add merchants to the blacklists, and that only partner banks can, but they will call these banks and tell them to do it on their behalf, and the banks are not in any position to refuse. PayPal has not been mentioned so far, but rest assured they are one of the most egregious and will drop you first. BitChute, a video platform competing with YouTube, was banned from PayPal. ZeroHedge itself is banned from using PayPal. To this day, because of my association with the Kiwi Farms, I cannot use the Uber app to get a taxi because Uber uses PayPal to process credit cards and I am banned from PayPal. Before we regulate the Internet, why don’t we try to regulate the payment networks? Give the market a fair chance at competing with tech giants by enforcing fair access to credit and debit card processing! The Office of the Comptroller of Currency proposed new regulation which would require banks (and the services they run, including payment networks) to stop industry blacklisting and require specific examples of risk to ban a merchant from processing cards. It was called Fair Access to Financial Services (OCC-2020-0042-0001). These “fair access” rules were finalized on January 14th, 2021. They were set to take effect on April 1st. Placing this on April Fool’s Day was a bit too prescient, because the Chairman immediately resigned after passing this rule, and the fair access rule was formally put on an indefinite pause on January 28th, 2021 – one week after Biden assumed office. This rule was politicized as a way for Republicans to force poor, innocent multinational trillion dollar banking institutions to do business with ‘evil’ industries like oil drilling and the NRA. The Chairman of the OCC made note that it should be an act of congress to regulate those industries, not unilaterally enforced by nameless risk management committees behind closed doors. It is unlikely that payment network regulation will find bipartisan support. The payment networks do a good job of picking their targets. Controversial but left-leaning organizations like Nation of Islam appear to have no issue processing cards, despite their virulent antisemitism rivaling anything found on Gab. Perhaps if Planned Parenthood suddenly needed cash upfront to perform abortions things would change. Until then, free speech will be clustered alongside weapons and Alaskan oil prospecting as an industry that is safe to punch down at. So, if bankers are above regulation for now, why not regulate social media? We have already amended Section 230 and it sucked. There are holes poked into Section 230 protections already. When Section 230 was first passed in 1996, Congress effectively legalized piracy. Platforms were immunized even from copyright infringement damages. So, if pirates could stay anonymous, there was no one to sue for distributing copies of movies. To patch the piracy loophole, in 1998, we passed the DMCA. This act created the process for the copyright takedown system that is infamous on websites like YouTube. Rights Holders can now take down copyrighted content and sue the services directly if they refuse to comply. Unfortunately, the process created is so sloppy and awful it is a continuous nightmare for a host like me (and everyone on YouTube) to deal with. For one, there is no recourse for flagrant or malicious DMCA takedowns. There is no requirement that the person sending the DMCA prove they own the copyright, to have a copyright ID, to be an attorney, or anything to that effect. I routinely receive copyright complaints that I must take seriously for content they don’t even own. OnlyFans (a Grand Cayman company) makes it clear in their Terms of Service that they do not own the content they host. Despite that, OnlyFans routinely sends me DMCA takedown notices for their 3rd party content through a man out of California who is not an attorney. This is a total farce, and there is nothing I can do. I still must reply with a counter notice, but they never take it to court and I never even hear back. I have no legal recourse against this abuse. This will be everything online if further loopholes were carved into Section 230. Imagine if defamation was handled the same way the copyright system is. Random trolls could issue takedowns for your Tweets and Facebook posts. You would have to send a legal counter notice with your real name and address to the troll to reinstate your messages. There would be no validations in place. Your speech would be at the mercy of the whims of insane people online. In this environment where platforms could be held liable for things said on their websites, only the richest of them could afford survival. I am currently dealing with two lawsuits. They are completely baseless, insane ramblings from insane people, but they will still cost a lot of money to deal with. There is no way to get fees from them because they have nothing to take. Without Section 230, I would lose a layer of protection enabling me to deal with these lawsuits for much less than it would if we had to take it to trial. It would destroy the site, especially since I cannot charge cards normally to generate consistent revenue to fund my defenses with. President Trump and people in general seem desperate just for revenge. The rabble directed towards Section 230 is out of anger. “If only this blow were delivered and 230 were repealed,” they think, “Twitter would be plunged into financial ruin overnight.” Maybe a Samson Option is what we need? Unfortunately, it is not so simple. Twitter would adapt and become more censorious to reduce its civil liabilities. All US search engines would have their results curated by anyone willing to complain about defamation—including, and perhaps especially, by public figures with something to hide. The smaller and less profitable sites hosted out of the US (Gab, Parler, 4chan, 8kun, Kiwi Farms, Encyclopedia Dramatica, thousands of small, federated services and communities) would either be destroyed outright, forced go private, or driven out of the United States. It would be a total disaster for the little guys. Jack Posobiec made a comment recently that Justice Clarence Thomas had ruled Section 230 was unconstitutional. This is not true. The opinion he cited as ‘sauce’ was not case law, but rather an opinion in the strictest sense. Thomas did not even claim Section 230 was unconstitutional. This misinformation was seen hundreds of thousands of times and further defamed the public perception of a law we rely on to even conduct these conversations about Section 230 online. So, if we can’t regulate the banks and Section 230 is actually good, what can we do? What Clarence Thomas actually suggested was that we might have to regulate the supermassive tech companies as ‘common carriers’ or utilities. Regulating only the largest social media networks could work. You can either be a monopoly, or you can be unregulated, you cannot be both. I maintain that regulating payment networks first would be ideal, but that will not happen. There is some hope that FedNow, an atrociously named US answer to SEPA, could offer some relief to this payment network bottleneck on speech. I am not optimistic for it, but it is good for more people to know it is supposedly in development. Cryptocurrencies bypass the payment network bottleneck now. The more people who know how to transact in cryptocurrency, the freer the Internet will be. Sites like buybitcoinworldwide.com (not an affiliate url) contain simple guides on how to get into the ecosystem regardless of your country. You do not have to invest any money in. Just learn how crypto works, how to get it, and how to send it. That knowledge cannot be taken away from you—and it might prove useful, sooner rather than later.

1 0

Li-ion battery costs.
by jim bell 09 Apr '21

09 Apr '21

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-reveals-plunge-lithium-ion-battery.html I've been following magnesium-ion batteries for a few years.

3 3

The Hill: Barreling towards a broadband blunder | TheHill
by jim bell 09 Apr '21

09 Apr '21

The Hill: Barreling towards a broadband blunder | TheHill. https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/547073-barreling-towards…

2 1

Technofascism?
by Karl 09 Apr '21

09 Apr '21

Given that governments and corporations usually have technology that exceeds the community, and that artificial intelligence can complete technological and physical research, providing universal "magic", is the correct thing to do to quickly research peak technology, so as to end the conflict and level the playing field? Batsoup and angry free luddites may instead propose that we struggle to physically fight and take down the existing infrastructure. Such behavior likely has some kind of impact, but not always the expected one. In the 2010s, political influence corporations like Cambridge Analytica used machine learning with public data to enumerate properties and predict behaviors of every single citizen of a given country, providing for significantly reduce privacy. It's hard to believe this enumeration was 100% exhaustive, given the diversity of life experiences out there. Still, it is frightening, and I'm sure research has improved since. It makes one wonder what would be needed for resistance against the various forms of real, serious slavery, to succeed.

3 2

Cryptocurrency: Miners Frontrun Unencrypted Trades, Signal Chat Adopts MOB Shitcoin
by grarpamp 09 Apr '21

09 Apr '21

> infinite self parody here : > > https://www.mobilecoin.foundation/about > "At MobileCoin, we believe governments have a legitimate interest in > regulating the economic lives of their citizens. > Good monetary policies help keep economies healthy and currency controls > help fight criminals and terrorists." Lol. > https://www.coindesk.com/miners-front-running-service-theft https://www.coindesk.com/ethermine-adds-front-running-software-to-help-mine… https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9152675 Flashboys 2.0 - Miner Extractable Value (MEV) https://medium.com/@danrobinson/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest-ecc5f0505dff https://medium.com/flashbots/quantifying-mev-introducing-mev-explore-v0-5cc… https://www.coindesk.com/bad-sandwich-defi-trader-poison-front-running-ethe… https://medium.com/offchainlabs/meva-what-is-it-good-for-de8a96c0e67c Alice can simply limit order, until limit users get censored out, leading tokens, markets, and networks to collapse and die due to friction, graft, high cost diminishing returns, etc. Some class of miner attacks are mitigated with zk / homomorphic / encryption, leaving miners nothing to see and preferentially mine but the txfee. Only the set of AMM+seller+buyer would be parties that can see the market tx data. Some crypto could even avoid prefs on txfee by contracting to release a hidden mining fee as second stage mine after the trade tx is mined, forcing miners to mine all tx equally, or starve and exit mining biz. Bitcoin-BTC is obviously subject to mining games based on its 100% cleartext content... censorship there by statistical mass, no cryptographic guarantee of unfettered unobserved fair access. https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/139 https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/3-540-44647-8_31.pdf http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~reiter/papers/1994/TOPLAS.pdf Early days.

1 0

Pocket-sized Nuclear Battery
by Karl 09 Apr '21

09 Apr '21

Maybe this has been posted before. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a35970222/radioactive-d… This company claims it will have a nanotechnology-based, nuclear-waste-powered, nondepleting battery in production by 2023. I'm not sure whether they have an actual prototype, or whether they explain how ionizing particle radiation is supposedly being contained, but it is being published by many news outlets right now. They say they were going to release, then coronavirus suddenly hit and they had to delay.

2 1

AP News: Myanmar junta limits internet, seizes satellite TV dishes
by jim bell 08 Apr '21

08 Apr '21

https://apnews.com/article/technology-aung-san-suu-kyi-myanmar-yangon-asia-… Jim Bell's comment: This is one reason I have hopes for SpaceX's Starlink Internet data link system. The Myanmar military can control terrestrial Internet, but they would have much more difficulty blocking Internet from space, and where there is no inherent reason that the Starlink management must obtain the approval of the government of that region. This may be ineffective in a very few cases, such as North Korea or perhaps Cuba, but in the large majority of nations, the governments want the luxury of being 'authoritarian-lite', yet want to have a mostly-functioning Internet. But merely having Starlink doesn't solve the whole problem. What I think Cypherpunk-oriented people could usefully do is to figure out how to. 1 Protect the Starlink ground terminals from detection by RDF (radio direction finding) means. One partial method would be to designate some of these stations as "receive-only", so that they don't give away their locations. 2. An even bigger problem:. How does the information downloaded by a ground station get, usably, to people in that nation, without risking tracing such links? Presumably this will include networks of anonymization sites, if somehow that remains allowed.

2 1

Top Biden cyber official: SolarWinds breach could turn from spying to destruction 'in a moment'
by jim bell 08 Apr '21

08 Apr '21

https://news.yahoo.com/top-biden-cyber-official-solar-winds-breach-could-tu… Anne Neuberger, deputy national security adviser on cyber and emerging technology, said Wednesday that hackers could use their access to U.S. networks for dest...

2 1

Hackaday: Review: What On Earth Is An Electromagnetic Radiation Tester And Why Would I Need One?
by jim bell 08 Apr '21

08 Apr '21

Hackaday: Review: What On Earth Is An Electromagnetic Radiation Tester And Why Would I Need One?. https://hackaday.com/2021/04/07/review-what-on-earth-is-an-electromagnetic-…

1 0