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It'll be decades before we'll have another Great American Novel (or Film)
by Ryan Carboni 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

There were books that captured the spirit of America so well that they are cherished by literate men for decades or centuries into the future. We don't have them anymore not because our writers are less capable, we don't have them anymore because the great evil that pervades these lands seeps into our culture, an expression of secret pain and hidden traumas that devastate America. These are smart capable people, how can they not notice? Why wouldn't they make a veiled commentary on our state of affairs (at least from time to time)? We have great fiction still, yes, but we wish to forget them. Or the fiction isn't about America. It is terrible. Everything is shameful now. America is a beautiful country of freedom, or maybe was, and hopefully will be. One day we will have art worthy of her name.

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Spying: Massive Global Phone Location Databases Bought and Sold Cell/GPS/WiFi/LAN
by grarpamp 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-ce… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833718 In addition to former WiFi maps... Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies -- largely unregulated, little scrutinized -- are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The New York Times: Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers. After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan. One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices' owners to the residences indefinitely. If you lived in one of the cities the dataset covers and use apps that share your location -- anything from weather apps to local news apps to coupon savers -- you could be in there, too. If you could see the full trove, you might never use your phone the same way again. Severed fibre cables disrupted internet access in eastern Europe, Iran, Turkey https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50851420 https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-companies-slap-back-at-the… https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2019/12/01/suspected-internet-cable-s… https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/19/federal-reserve-bank-glitch-delayed-bank-ac…

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Govt Attaches Snowden Book Proceeds, Tosses Out Surveillance Lawsuit; SSH, PBS
by Ryan Carboni 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm I am debating with myself whether to send a token donation to Radio Free Asia or to directly donate to the US treasury. Well, I could write off a donation to Radio Free Asia.

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Govt Attaches Snowden Book Proceeds, Tosses Out Surveillance Lawsuit; SSH, PBS
by grarpamp 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/12/us-government-is-entitled-to-al… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21832129 infohash:AF5F9B5D4657DD3EDD0C080C4086CA346D03DBBC infohash:14BC623E91FBC7C50AF8620A212EF2B413D23692 infohash: 3D2904E3CC704CF10BB86882DB2419F58DE22C83 audiobook https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/judge-dismisses-wikimedia-case-agai… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826567 https://xorhash.gitlab.io/xhblog/0010.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21826495 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/17/over-100-pbs-local-stations-start-streami… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21818518

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Your Cypherpunks archive
by jim bell 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

I have just discovered a startling omission in your Cypherpunks archive. A HUGE number of postings on the subject of AP, my assassination politics essay, which I began posting maybe about April/May 1995 are simply not there. And, in fact, postings on the subject of AP at least until early November 1995 seem to be missing. And perhaps after November 1995. I don't know what other classes of emails may also be missing, but I think it will be very important to find out this information. I looked at the archive because I wanted to determine the earliest that the subject of "Assassination Politics" appeared on the Cypherpunks list. It might have been April 1995.Note: as weird as it may sound, there are reasons that this material might have been tampered with, but I don't know what time the tampering occurred. We are discussing this on the Cypherpunks list. I assume you will want to participate. Jim Bell

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Someone forgot ten pounds of C-4 in New York
by Ryan Carboni 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

https://search.wikileaks.org/gifiles/emailid/1327639 New York police discovered a trash bag containing around 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) of what has been described as C-4 explosive in a Manhattan cemetery the morning of Oct. 11. The material did not present an immediate threat, as it was not primed with a blasting cap - a component required to successfully detonate the explosives - or a firing train for initiating a blasting cap. The New York Police Department's bomb squad has reportedly secured the material, but the area around Marble Cemetery in East Greenwich Village on 2nd Street between 1st and 2nd avenues remains closed to traffic. It is difficult to imagine an innocent explanation for how six to eight blocks of apparent plastic explosive (likely comprising about 3 to 4.5 kilograms) came to be abandoned in the cemetery. Since the material was not primed, it does not appear to have been in the final phase of deployment for an attack. While information is still preliminary, there are a number of potential reasons for the material's presence in the cemetery. It is possible that the explosives were left there as a dead drop, to be passed to someone with bombmaking experience to construct an explosive device. It is also possible that it was simply abandoned there by someone who wanted to dispose of it. Since C-4 is a military-grade explosive, it is likely that the material can be traced back to establish where it was made, who bought it and when, which would provide clues as to how it ended up Manhattan. A number of nations manufacture C-4 and military-grade plastic explosives similar to C-4, such as PE-4A. The New York Police Department and its U.S. federal law enforcement partners in the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will certainly be working overtime to attempt to determine the provenance of these explosives in order to discover who placed them there and why, in addition to testing the material to verify that it is in fact explosive and not a hoax. If the recovered explosives were still in their wrappers with lot numbers affixed, the job of tracing them will be easier. However, if they were U.S.-manufactured explosives that had been stolen or captured in a war zone, the trail may be hard to trace. If the explosive blocks did not have wrappers with lot numbers, a chemical analysis of the explosives should help the authorities narrow down the possibilities. New York remains one of the highest-profile targets for terrorist attacks in the United States, and plots to detonate explosives there are regularly investigated and disrupted. The last such plot was the failed May 1 attempt to detonate a car packed with a poorly constructed explosive device in Times Square. Indeed, many of these failed plots, like those involving Najibullah Zazi and Faisal Shahzad, failed for want of real explosives. This amount of plastic explosive would be enough to construct a relatively small improvised explosive device if it wound up in the hands of someone who wanted to use it violently, possessed a detonator or two and had some basic explosives training, but it would not be enough to create any large-scale damage by itself.

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Tor Stinks re Traffic Analysis and Sybil (as do other networks)
by grarpamp 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

> recommend utilizing Tor to combat government surveillance If users adversaries operate under whichever governments classification levels such as TOP SECRET FVEY, and especially if the users are doing something that such govts would take personal affront to, such users need to do some serious thinking. > low-latency This phrase is misused by many as if it were some kind of litmus test for determining TA resistance... it is not. It's likely possible to create a LL network that traffic analysis cannot penetrate even with every single link tapped. Latency, purely by itself, does not define whether or not a network is secure against traffic analysis. Latency (whatever level therein) really refers to the useability different categories of apps would have at such level... the user experience. > "All ... systems as currently designed and deployed are essentially > broken against The Man" Surely generally true by now. Tor's nearly 25 year old design since inception is nothing more than a bunch of free proxies that users chain through (same as VPN's). Perhaps a bit better than VPN by maybe weighting traffic towards busy, plus an assortment of other things, and some more worse than VPN due to obvious simplicity of infesting the network with a nasty case of Sybil to the tune of 100+ nodes a month in some months. Luckily the dumb ones are caught, but it's not those that users should worry about. Like VPN, Tor is good at giving users a different IP that the everyday world of civilian / commercial endpoints has a hard time tracing. But hardly so good at resisting what Govt's and GigaCorps can now analyze and attack. Even independant smalltime researchers are confirming TA and Sybil methods against Tor and many other overlay networks. As to the *PA's listed before, they've had the thought, vantage, access, coordination, tech, money, etc to TA, and certainly to Sybil, just about any overlay network since about the time such networks came into being. 1995 2000 2005 and if by 2010 and Snowden people weren't assessing that capability exists, even based only on opensource research, well pity the fool. TA, Sybil, *PA's, GT-1's etc are no longer just some sidebar caveats in highbrow whitepapers to be dismissed and buried. There needs to be new networks deployed that take those as their top design considerations over all others. > https://www.schneier.com/blog/ Schneier seems much more a friend of govcorp (ie Counterpane), and a generic blogwonk, than any sort of genuine users activist taking any sort of strongly voiced principled stand on anything that matters. As Chiefs on Tor Board one might look for Schneier and Blaze to be publicly saying and doing some project, Tor or other, regarding TA, Sybil, or even disproving them if they weren't real threats, or at least something... instead Tor and other nets are often crickets on that. (Old congressional testimonies are also oldsauce, stir up some new hot chili.) Note also that Tor doesn't need to actually care about its users security to play whatever legal test and game in the courts that it and it's lawyers are lined up waiting to play (remember Tor was tied with EFF for many years for various reasons). How are users to be indemnified by anyone, if not first by themselves using the security of a network itself, and if the network is not capable, then what. Regardless of whether Tor etc is good or bad or none of the above, holding a near monopoly in the space on cashflow, legal, steering tech, discourse, twatterverse populism, etc... for ~10-15 years... is not good situation. Competition is healthy. And while the design of today's networks is largely unchangeable by nature of being deployed, their adversaries are adapting to leverage clearly whitepapered weaknesses in those designs since years. New networks... from internet overlay, fiber, radio, carrier pigeon, dropgangs... need to be researched, coded, and deployed by new players. Anyway, have some traffic noise generators... http://trackmenot.io/ https://adnauseam.io/

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Anti-Prude Feminism
by Ryan Carboni 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

Recently discovered Pando closed. Personally have no idea if I'll have a negative surface altitude of six feet, but before then I hope I'll be involved with people who agree that firing a person with cause would restrict their golden parachute to only compensation for legal fees relating to their employment. None of modern feminism has resulted in any real gains for women's rights. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/business/google-ceo-vows-to-do-better-af… Google's top executive said Thursday he is "committed to doing better" as his workforce staged a global protest over reports that Android co-founder Andy Rubin received a $90 million severance package after his termination following sexual misconduct claims by a coworker. https://pando.com/2019/10/23/we-sold-pando/ And of course I’m not the only one, and my experience was far from the worst: In the last few years I have been overwhelmed by stories of sexual assault and harassment told by so many incredibley women in the Valley, holding back so much talent and driving so much talent out of the industry.

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Cryptocurrency: Music
by grarpamp 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

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Horowitz Examining Past FISA Applications to Determine if FBI's 'Basic Errors' are Systemic | National Review
by jim bell 19 Dec '19

19 Dec '19

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/horowitz-examining-past-fisa-applicatio…

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