- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

shells suck! - is a sane syntax possible?
by Zenaan Harkness 01 Aug '17

01 Aug '17

The BASH shell is an inordinate duplicity of features wrapped in a cacophany of syntax, where it's almost impossible to ascertain the sane lowest common denominator and almost-identical appearing syntax can have disastrous results if a single character is missed or added (thus resulting in a completely alternate syntax reality). And when one tries to do something truly elegant, to "master bash", one discovers after weeks of ones irrelevant-to-bash time, that absolutely nothing is elegant, and the variations ultimately make nothing of any even mild complexity/robustness, simple. So then of course one discovers dash, when you want higher performance, a much smaller footprint, or simply to attain that hallowed "lowest common denominator" syntax (don't be fooled friends, don't be fooled!). To test out new code/syntax efficiently one would presume the command line is a reasonable place to go, but for starters dash (at least when launched from a bash shell) has no readline support, and xorg -> xterm -> bash -> tmux -> bash -> dash is evidently too much for little dash, since not even the arrow keys work (nor Home, End, Del and probably others), no readline, no command history, just backspace and paste with the mouse (same on Linux console for the curious...). There goes -that- experiment! Of course there's a certain irony where for increased performance in bash there is the useful-sounding "arithmetic context" feature ("((" and "))"), which by the way is not impelemented in dash - for performance reasons. Oh well, so I throwze in me towell, "eff it! effing eff it already!!" and decides the LCD of "/bin/test" will bring the sanity of consistency if not the salvation of sane syntaxity. But, you guessed it, NO! 'Twas not to be! Dash. Simple. LCD. Yes, that must be it the one true way - I see it in all system scripts - albeit they look a little verbose here and there, there's an undeniable consistency about them, and everyone says "dash runs faster", so it must be true:: performance? check! apparent relative consistency? check! What's not to like? Well, learning the differences for starters. Despite a MUCH more approachable man page than that ungodly bash man page (which is admittedly still better than no man page). And don't get me started on the frustration arising from trying to test dash from the command line due to the frustration of trying to use dash instead of bash in my scripts, due to the frustration arising from the ungodly unconsistencys of bash syntax, and bash syntax as compared with dash syntax, and bash vs dash inbuilt test syntax and vs /bin/test and /bin/[ command line "command" syntax (just try lexico strings comparison with < or > in each environment). AAARRRGHHGHGHGGE !@#@!!.. ... . . . .. ....... . Thy consistency must not be obtained yet ye suffer the inability to compare numbers except for some strange options which evidence the necessity to prefix every test, for numbers or strings, with a bloody x. That's right! The crucifixion of syntax itself with the imposition of the cross, the wholey cross, and nothing but the cross, every where, every time, every place, everywhere, every script, and also every where. And I mean --everywhere-- you look! (Did I mention EVERYwhere?!!). And why? Why thank you for asking - because /bin/test won't work in various system-destroying scenarios otherwise, that's why!!! See above, heathen, see above! <soothing voiceover> Imagine a soft blue light as you experience that quiescence calmly rising, on your deep in-breath, bathed in pure essential shell mastery of that single letter, "x", solving all your syntaxtical perturbxtions, gently smaxhes itxelf on your eye ballx, thux enxuring your enduring peaxe and happinexx with life and Unix itxelf. </soothing voiceover> Seriously, it's time for a change, time for sane shell syntax, time for ... the one true language. (No no! Not the oblig xkcd cartxxn, ANYthing but the oblig!! We need standards, lots of them, and more standards!) And since all the existing shell and scripting standards are completely insufficient, it's time for the obligatory implementation of a new, all-encompassing shell with universal syntax applicable to all languages, all tools and all environments, incestuously binding with all other languages and admitting no deficiency! That's right - you guessed it :) , it's time for Lisp! Shell has had its day, and "eval" is waay too clumsy in comparison with the visual elegance of Lisp where every second letter is an utterly uniform opening or closing bracket, where the original theoretical language struts itself in simple glory and where ultimately every "fancy new design feature" in every "fancy new language" somehow always existed in elegance from the origin. Bow, punk! Bow before Lisp, the alpha and the omega of programming languages! Every concept ever "discovered" in "fancy new programming language"s of the day, from functions to modules, objects to tail calls, run-time self modification, objects, and universal appeal. That's Lisp. Well perhaps that teeny little "universal appeal" bit ... And on that note, a question: Any suggestions as to which functional language variant might be most suitable for "shell" glue script repalement language? Thanks, Z (PS: there's a little rather bland and dull, but nonetheless just mildly humorous, humour, on the fish shell web page: https://fishshell.com/ I might check that out as a bash replacement...)

2 1

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/09/disreputable-men.html
by Ryan Carboni 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/09/disreputable-men.html Gary Sick's is an interesting story. Sick is the author of October Surprise, one of the best accounts of the covert deal struck in the Fall of 1980 between senior Republicans, arms merchants and Iranian mullahs to delay the return of the American hostages until Ronald Reagan's inauguration. But as interesting as it is, that's not the story I mean. I'm talking about Sick's own story: his passage from career White House insider to "conspiracy theorist." ... My experience was not unlike that of a medieval scholar discovering traces of a hidden text beneath the script of an old parchment.... I felt as if I were wandering into a spy novel. The backgrounds and activies of some of these individuals who were emerging from the shadows of this operation seemed to come out of fiction, and yet they were real.... most of my professional life had been spent as an analyst of political and military intelligence. I knew that there were operatives for hire, ready to skirt the law for money, perhaps out of habit or duty, or simply for the thrill and sense of power illegal acts conveyed. But it was nonetheless a shock to meet them.... ... Such characters are a researcher's nemesis; they are meant to be. When the CIA or other intelligence agencies need to hire a "contractor," who may be required to carry out taks that are potentially dangerous and of questionable legality, they look for three things: a specific and useful skill (a knowledge of money-laundering, perhaps); a romantic streak that glorifies both the secrecy and the risk; and a propensity for exageration and trouble. One former CIA officer, David MacMichael, has said that the agency looks for these freelancers at small community airports and gun ranges - places where men go to excape the boredom of everyday life. Looking for adventure, these men are fascinated by the imagined glamour and excitement of the world of espionage. MacMichael said that often, after one or two assignments, the agency will put a contractor on a case in which he runs afoul of the law. The contractor finds himself in a compromising position - nothing so major as to put him permanently out of commission, but significant enough that if he ever starts telling tales out of school about covert operations, his record will discredit his testimony. ... Take, for instance, the case of Delmart Vreeland. A scoundrel by every account, but also one with exceptional information for those with ears to hear. He did pass on the "Let one happen, stop the rest" warning from a Toronto jail cell before 9/11; his claim that Canadian diplomat Marc Bastien had been poisoned in Moscow has been proven correct; the Pentagon unwittingly acknowledged his lengthy service record when it was called in open court, by relying on archived records undamaged by the 9/11 attack from which he had not been purged (the prosecution argued, incredibly, that Vreeland must have hacked into the Pentgon files from his jail cell); Leo Wanta, longtime intelligence asset who destabilized the Soviet ruble in the '80s at the White House request, confirmed Vreeland was an operative of the Office of Naval Intelligence; his lawyers did receive death threats and found their files vandalized; and Vreeland has vanished. But none of that matters to the coincidentalists, who stubbornly refuse to see deeper than the "legends" created for men like Vreeland, which is precisely the point. So Lee Harvey Oswald is a "communist," and Barry Seal just a drug runner. That Oswald was seen with the CIA's David Atlee Phillips in September 1963, and Barry Seal was gunned down with Vice President George Bush's personal phone number in his trunk, need to be ignored. The coincidentalists can't make sense of such evidence, that respectable men would have anything to do with such characters. But without them, some respectable men would be able to do very little. --- Well, Vreeland had since the essay been written, convicted of soliciting child prostitution in Franklin County, which is a bit messed up if you heard the backstory of Franklin County. The moment we live in a free society is probably when Kiriakou is working at an Apple Store and is visited by the Attorney General and when Thomas Drake has a fellowship with a major think tank, and it is when Delmart Vreeland is a free man not on trumped up charges. I think Marine One with Obama in it flew by my house once.

2 1

Russia, Others: VPN Haters
by grarpamp 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6qjz5g/putin_bans_vpns_to_stop_russi… https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/6qiwo5/putin_bans_vpns_to_stop_…

4 3

Smart Cities: Already Corrupt, Now Anti-Privacy
by grarpamp 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6qe503/baltimore_prosecutor_tosses_3… http://www.computerworld.com/article/3211402/mobile-wireless/how-smart-citi… Cryptome documents linknyc kiosk archit....... http://www.bing.com/search?q=cryptome+linknyc

1 0

Linkin Park: Dead
by grarpamp 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/6oi3gu/chester_bennington_of_linkin_… https://www.youtube.com/results?q=linkin+park&sp=CANQFA%253D%253D https://linkinpark.com/news/news/448101/dear-chester We're building it up to burn it down...

1 0

BTC-E Seized, Alphabay, Hansa, Bitshares Decentral Exchange, Etc
by grarpamp 31 Jul '17

31 Jul '17

https://btc-e.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BTCE/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BTCE/search?q=btc-e+seized&sort=relevance&t=week https://www.reddit.com/r/BTCE/search?q=alphabay&sort=relevance&t=week Recent news in cryptos, expect related fallout. Also..... https://bitshares.org/

1 0

It's #NationalSysAdminDay! (image: 34.4kb)
by Razer 29 Jul '17

29 Jul '17

Show your sysadmin how much you need them. Crash something. Rr

1 0

The Secret Sauce or how governments use mass hypnosis
by Ryan Carboni 28 Jul '17

28 Jul '17

Well, all my knowledge of hypnosis comes from an episode of Bull. Repetition is a powerful thing, among other things it indicates success or consensus if one approaches it from an evolutionary psychology perspective. What I said a long time ago about how cryptography is incremental, that easier to cryptanalyze provable ciphers would have less papers, and that more complex ciphers would have more papers, it isn't an incredible observation. But noting the observation would reduce the impact that the deluge of papers on Simon and Speck would have (if it was simple to cryptanalyze there'd be only two or three papers on each). There was also a lot of repetition in the recent efforts to remove RC4 and Triple DES. (nevermind the efforts to remove Saddam) RC4 in particular had someone use it for a file encryption system for deniability? Spotlight was a movie produced with assistance from First Look. There was a scene that extremely disturbed me, more than all the child molestation. Well, two scenes to be exact. The first scene was the new editor ordering the journalists to investigate a case. The second scene was that the paper did write about child molestation allegations in the past, but they put it into the metro section. How easily are people manipulated? These journalists went on to win prizes for their reporting, so clearly they are not responsible for their own success. These are exceptional allegations, the metro article was about a dozen alleged cases? Then it turned out to be hundreds of children? The part that really disturbed me is that no one reflected on this. This is a thing that happened. The journalists unwittingly allowed it to occur. Cardinal Law wittingly allowed it to occur. The truth is out there. It is not hard to find. Actually, all the journalists, with their intelligence contacts... they have to be itching to ask one question. How could so many people in the intelligence community be okay with the popular outrage from Snowden? How do they rationalize it? Well. I don't know, but I think they are naive enough to ignore past misdeeds, and they get told various things. Like how it was Clapper's duty to lie to Congress (!) because no comment or this should be in a closed hearing would be too suspicious. How could it be that they think what they are doing is legal, but we think that hiding information from the public is suspicious and sign of illegality? Maybe the government does incidental collection with disk images and wiretaps on an alarming scale. Maybe... maybe.... You are being manipulated. Only you can produce your freedom.

1 0

DefCon attendees will have the opportunity to Hackathon 30 US Digital Voting Machines
by Razer 28 Jul '17

28 Jul '17

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/07/26/voting-machines-hackers-elec… LAS VEGAS – Think of it as a stress test for democracy. Hackers plan to spend this weekend trying to break into more than 30 voting machines used in recent elections to see just how far they can get. U.S. election officials have consistently said that despite Russian attempts to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, no votes were tampered with. Prove it, say organizers of DefCon, an annual hacker convention held in Las Vegas each July. The idea is to “start hacking on (the machines) to raise awareness and find out for ourselves what the deal is. I'm tired of reading misinformation about voting system security,” Jeff Moss, DefCon founder, wrote on the conference blog. One of the event organizers is Matt Blaze, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who's been working on making election software more secure since the mid-2000s. The the best of his knowledge, this will be the first time a technical crowd will have the ability to look at the machines “on a large scale.” That’s in part because until 2015, it was illegal under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to try to hack into voting machines. “The Library of Congress granted an exemption that explicitly allowed this type of research, to enable good faith research of security flaws,” said Stephanie Singer a project lead with Free & Fair, a Portland, Ore.-based election technology company. The event comes as attempted election meddling has become a major geo-political issue both in the United States and worldwide. This week the Senate grilled the president’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, on possible collusion in Russian attempts to influence the U.S. presidential election via hacking. (He denied collusion.) Prior to the 2016 presidential election, hackers probed election works in at least 39 states, according to a report by Bloomberg last month. Cyberattacks over the past year in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, France and Austria have attributes that linked them to suspected Russian hackers, according to former National Intelligence director James Clapper. They appeared to be aimed at influencing election results, sowing discord and undermining faith in public institutions that included government agencies, the media and elected officials. In all of this, there has been no indication that actual votes were changed, the FBI has said. Election officials have cited the decentralized nature of the U.S. election system, which is state, county and sometimes even municipality-based. However, experts in election voting software say no states routinely perform post-election vote audits to ensure that the reported vote count tallies with ballots, Singer said. Moreover, there were no forensic examinations of any of the voting machines used in the 2016 presidential election, in part because many election-machine vendor contracts prohibit it, Singer said. That’s a red flag for hackers at DefCon. To see just how safe the voting machines that underpin democracy are, they're bringing more than 30 voting machines purchased on eBay and at government surplus sales to Las Vegas where they're setting up a “Voting Machine Hacking Village” at the conference at Caesar's Palace. There they'll spend the weekend probing the network connecting the machines, physically attempting to alter the machines and hacking into their hardware. The effort is being overseen by two well-known researchers in the field of election security, Blaze and Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer programer who in 2005 showed it was possible to hack into a Diebold voting machine and change vote tallies, a technique now known as “the Hursti Hack.” "You never know what that kind of a spark will ignite. My hope is that we’ll see a broadening of the community of people interesting in improving the security of our election system,” Blaze said. The program is just one of a week's worth of computer security conference events happening in Las Vegas. The first is Black Hat, followed by DefCon. Other workshop topics include how to hack a wind farm, defenses against drones (the French military is training eagles to pluck them out of the sky), the latest in car hacking and an in-depth look at just how hard it is to knock out the power grid (hint: not as hard as it should be.) --30--

2 3

Tails prevents MAC changes as design feature
by didukno 27 Jul '17

27 Jul '17

> intrigeri intrigeri at boum.org > Tue Jul 4 06:13:41 UTC 2017 > > We don't actively support the use case described below It seems that you do: >>Tails User Goals: Hide geographical movement >>Tails User Goals: No unspoofed usage of Tails >>Tails User Goals: Not raising alarms on the network >>Tails User Goals: Avoid network connection problems Geographical movement is revealed by device leaks before Tails boots. The OUI is not spoofed when using Tails. A new MAC every Tails session on low traffic networks raises alarms. Network device quantity limitations causes connection problems eventually. Clearly, the current MAC spoofing protocol, which violates every Tails User Goal, puts Tails users at risk. The ideal tools: - Host machine(s) with no internal network devices - External PCI/USB network card(s) - Tails on USB Stick(s) The ideal process: - Power on host machine - Press and hold keys to access EFI Boot Menu - Plug Tails USB Stick into host machine - Select Tails system drive as it appears - Create Administrative Account at Greeter as Tails boots - Set custom MAC address(s) at Greeter as Tails boots - Start Tails - Plug in External PCI/USB network card(s) - Have Network Manager recognize, then assign, the appropriate MAC - Connect to network Please consider this wonderful case and directly support the changing of MAC address OUI and NIC. > stop/start NetworkManager.service > wifi.cloned-mac-address=preserve Thanks. > ill-advised cross-posting Not every one is you. didukno

1 0