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Cypherpunks list planned downtime
by Greg Newby 08 Apr '20

08 Apr '20

I will be upgrading the main pglaf.org server starting the morning of Saturday, April 11 (by around 10am Eastern Daylight Time). During this time, the Cypherpunks list and archives will be unavailable: https://lists.cpunks.org No email will be sent out. Incoming email will be queued or deferred. Let me know if you have any questions about what will be unavailable. This upgrade should not impact any of the behaviors of the services, once they are restored. - Greg

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Watch this space: "Rhode Island National Guard to Conduct House-To-House Searches to Hunt Down New Yorkers"
by Zenaan Harkness 08 Apr '20

08 Apr '20

Interesting times - watch this space: INSANITY: Rhode Island National Guard to Conduct House-To-House Searches to Hunt Down New Yorkers https://www.anti-empire.com/insanity-rhode-island-national-guard-to-conduct… Rhode Island police began stopping cars with New York plates Friday. On Saturday, the National Guard will help them conduct house-to-house searches to find people who traveled from New York and demand 14 days of self-quarantine. .. Many New Yorkers have summer houses in Rhode Island, especially in tony Newport, and the governor said the authorities would be checking there. “Yesterday I announced and today I reiterated: Anyone coming to Rhode Island in any way from New York must be quarantined,” the governor said. “By order. Will be enforced. Enforceable by law.” Raimondo signed an executive order Thursday that applies to anyone who has been in New York during the past two weeks and through at least April 25. It doesn’t apply to public health, public safety, or health-care workers. National Guard members will be stationed at the T.F. Green airport, Amtrak train stations and at bus stops. The citizen-soldiers will be following up with people at local residences. The maximum penalty for not complying: a fine of $500 and 90 days in prison. The local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union blasted the new rules, objecting to the collection of motorists’ contact information in particular. ..

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ZDNet: DarkHotel hackers use VPN zero-day to breach Chinese government agencies
by jim bell 08 Apr '20

08 Apr '20

ZDNet: DarkHotel hackers use VPN zero-day to breach Chinese government agencies. https://www.zdnet.com/article/darkhotel-hackers-use-vpn-zero-day-to-comprom…

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Re: [tor-talk] Jitsi Meet over Tor
by grarpamp 08 Apr '20

08 Apr '20

> Yes, VoIP via UDP works very well through Tor with OnionCat. However, > both endpoints must be running Tor and OnionCat. Basically, all devices > running Tor and OnionCat have IPv6 addresses in the same /48 subnet. So > any such device can connect with any other. > But _not_ with any other IPv6 (or IPv4) address. It's entirely possible to have some comms peers on clearnet in same chatscreen panel mashup at the same time with peers on onioncat/48, i2p.etc. It all depends on the routing horizons, and or hub selections, users setup and maintain in such conferences. > Yes, you can route VPNs through Tor. However, I don't recommend doing > that except in Whonix. Whonix is quite reasonable interesting isolation idea over Tails. Be sure to evaluate the two in own usage models. > You could use a commercial VPN service, or run your own VPN server in a > VPS. But either way, you'd need to do everything ~anonymously through > Tor. Or in other words, your anonymity using the VPN via Tor will be > limited by how anonymously you paid for the VPN service or VPS. So that > means well-mixed Bitcoin, or better perhaps Monero. Imagine an overlay network that offered VPN termination services to clearnet from the overlay... even cryptocurrency supported ones, such as cryptocurrency data storage networks do today... the models exist, explore them. Note also, Zcash style zero-knowledge is still quite equally valid to this day, among other competing privacy crypto models such as Monero. Explore the entirety of onchain privacy, it is evolving nicely, early days. > All things considered, it'd be simpler, and arguably more anonymous, if > you can force Jitsi to use TCP via plain Tor. Not against State Associated Agents, such as say LE conjoined with Top Secret entities Parallel Constructing, or other generic Sybil trolls, perhaps, as in the subject Snowden and other slides and public docs, this hardly in fact true, tor being no exception, witness myriad published tor network exploits, same as any other current overlay network. Against random wannabe's, such as say an employer, or some website, sure, reasonably well. Those two, and others, are still a good thing, accomplished by any fairly rudimentary overlay measures. That covers many users, but not all those rightfully, justly, and naturally, freedom and privacy oriented. Also, Tor Project Inc snowflakes are censoring this post by forcing it to go to mandatory "moderation" first, while others are free to post entirely unmoderated, including, shamefully, said self appointed TPIs. Think of the ramifications before you accept such censorship regimes in your life. Move to distributed messaging, social, and multimedia to ensure your freedom of speech and consumption against such censors like TPO, Youtube, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, etc... ASAP!

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Google Apple Aim to Entrench Broken Hijackable SMS 2FA
by grarpamp 07 Apr '20

07 Apr '20

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-backs-apples-sms-otp-standard-proposal/

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Censorship: Ignorant Freedom Hating Top Posters and YouTube Censor David Icke
by grarpamp 07 Apr '20

07 Apr '20

Ignorant Top Posters mimic Eternal September https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233 David Icke censored by YouTube https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804393 Corporate Social Media are not freedom platforms. Seek distributed systems.

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Cryptocurrency: Distributed Oracles
by grarpamp 07 Apr '20

07 Apr '20

https://medium.com/witnet/why-do-we-need-a-decentralized-oracle-network-91b… https://witnet.io/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7nwis4/why_i_believe_chain… https://chain.link/

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Soul cookie -- Fw: Sleepy cat gets a bit crowded by his buddies
by Zig the N.g 07 Apr '20

07 Apr '20

The -most- important thing to remember here is that there is only ONE breed of animal - The Animal - there are no birds (that's birdist) and there are no cats (that's catism). There are just animals and making any distinction is absolute patriarchal dominance at its worst! It's 2020 already! Tube cat direct: https://t.co/LHbenCk1se ----- Forwarded message ----- Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2020 08:07:23 +1300 Subject: Re: Sleepy cat gets a bit crowded by his buddies Unreal! Beautiful. Cannot look at them without bursting into smiles :) :) :) On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 2:35 AM Zenaan Harkness <zen(a)freedbms.net> wrote: > Sleepy cat is happy with his buddies crowding in on him :) > > > https://sputniknews.com/videoclub/202002211078371191-my-precious-cat-sleeps… > > ----- End forwarded message -----

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HK: Coronavirus fallout - toilet paper runs - snatch n grab at knifepoint - what humans do
by Zig the N.g 06 Apr '20

06 Apr '20

And from the "one death, bat soup and panic buying, to 'grab your toilet paper at knifepoint'" dept. - understanding human psychology when tshtf: Gold is the most important thing, so the most important things, like toilet paper, must be wrapped in golden wrapping [pic of actual goden wrapped toilet papers being carried by the dozens outside a store, from article not attached]. And of course, as everybody knows, when tshtf the most important things end up in short supply - so what do you do? Grab the golden loot at any cost, even knifepoint, that's what you do: Coronavirus: Hong Kong police on a roll as third suspect in toilet paper heist flushed out https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3051231/coronavir… Christy Leung Published: 11:00pm, 18 Feb, 2020 - Man was picked up during raid at guest house on Sai Yee Street a day after supermarket staff were robbed at knifepoint early on Monday morning - Hong Kong has been gripped by panic buying since the coronavirus outbreak, as spooked residents snap up essentials such as rice and tissue paper Another man has been arrested in Hong Kong for his role in a bizarre toilet paper heist outside a Mong Kok supermarket, as a gang aimed to clean up during a run of panic buying in the city, sparked by the deadly coronavirus. The man, 26, was picked up during a raid at a guest house on Sai Yee Street, not far from the scene of the robbery – in which 600 toilet rolls worth HK$1,640 (US$211) were stolen. “We believe the trio thought the rolls would have [market] value and that they could profit by reselling them,” Chief Inspector Chow Ka-man said. “They knew each other and one of them has a triad background.” Chow added the gangs moved the toilet rolls in a trolley after the crime and that he believed there would be more arrests. At about 6am on Monday, three masked men stole 50 packets of toilet roll from a delivery man outside a Wellcome supermarket in Mong Kok. Police said one of the men was armed with two knives. Two people, aged 50 and 55, were arrested on Monday, and the force said at the time they were seeking three others, thought to be aged between 20 and 30. Two of the arrested were guest house employees while the third was unemployed. Wellcome earlier said its staff were threatened and robbed while they were unloading a delivery from a truck at the store. No one was injured. The incident followed weeks of panic buying at supermarkets across the city after online rumours sparked fears of a shortage of essential goods, such as rice and tissue paper, caused by the outbreak of the virus, which originated in mainland China. The government repeatedly reassured the public that supplies remain unaffected by the outbreak, yet residents continued to empty grocery stores. Hong Kong recorded its 62nd confirmed case of infection on Tuesday evening, and there has been one death.

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Video Audio Conferencing: Codecs, Crypto, Peer Modes, RF, CU-SeeMe History... [re: Zoom’s crypto]
by grarpamp 06 Apr '20

06 Apr '20

Various wrote: > https://jitsi.org/ >> And this represents a very big sacrifice of resources in the connection? >> My problem with jitsi so far has been that it does not work very well if >> either end has a bad internet connection, which is more or less common in >> Latin America. >>> We hope to be layering on end-to-end encryption features, and would >>> happily take community contributions. > I don’t believe the encryption/decryption is all that resource intensive in > comparison to the encoding and decoding of the video and audio streams > themselves. > > We have a few features to try to deal with this, including audio-only mode > and the ability to send lower-quality video (Low bandwidth mode) One thing many voice and video apps get wrong is shipping with defaults set to what in bandwidth terms effectively amounts to 4kHDR 60fps video + CDDA audio. It cannot be made any more clear that this is completely unnecessary for servicable comms, and does not establish good thinking or expectations. Even just a fraction of 160x120 4-bit video and 8k audio works fine. Wannabe conferencers today are brainwashed by BluRay and Gaming out of what is actually possible within a 56kbps channel or less... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe All you need is just enough to lip and ear sync to the video and audio. Cranking your codecs way down also saves you much needed bandwidth for more peers, file transfers, messaging, signaling, integration, crypto, other applications, etc... making world a happier place. With as little as 1Mbps you could be conferencing 8 fully meshed (no hub) independently encrypted peers. If sensible defaults, and crazy minimums, aren't offered, the promising freedoms of non-third-party-in-the-middle P2P conferencing are that much harder to meet. > I do know we suffer from poor performance on connections for which packet > loss/packet drops are common. It is nature of beasts, of time, of being confined to intermediate MAC+PHY layers, choose your evil... TCP imparts pauses, UDP zaps the gap... physics deny a general solution. Explore random encrypted ultra wideband spread spectrum guerrilla RF via SDR if you want to make use of some interesting and alternative channel physics. Also consider routes over I2P, Phantom, Tor, and other overlay networks. CU-SeeMe... "The predominant objective here was to devise algorithms that would be fast enough for real time videoconferencing on the typical Macintosh platforms that were available in mid-1992, which mainly consisted of 68020 and 68030 based machines." -- Tim Dorcey, Cornell University. >From Connexions, Volume 9, No.3, March 1995 "Milazzo, Paul. Informal demonstration of dvc at the December 1991 meeting of the IETF in Santa Fe." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4h6oElcOtI https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL96B30F6A04A29427 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz-YHbQ2dA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDBOIdmkdEw

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