- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Cryptocurrency: Needs UTXO databases, CCDEX, etc [re: Anon $75M to Dev Tech]
by grarpamp 15 Nov '19

15 Nov '19

> https://www.unknown.fund/ > Unknown Fund - Press Release 11/13/2019 > [snip] In addition to developing and moving the entire cryptocurrency space away from legacy non-privacy non-anon first generation tech... such as, say, the interesting failure to use TLS etc in their transports against rampant surveillance... Cryptocurrency also needs to develop and move away from the obscene transaction-based perpetual growth of first generation blockchains... away from the still unwieldy, risky and even faulty predictive claims that phones and computers will keep up, that in some cases give excuse to continue use of central or even faux-distributed "light wallet" lookup models and dependencies ala SPV, the current requirement that ever growing Terabytes of such chains exist in perpetuity for UTXO validation back to their Genesis Blocks... such TB's of data easily datamined for privacy, censorship, abuse, and subject to future unforseen privacy exploits, and a pointless storage and transport offense laid upon everyone... To blockchains that regularly checkpoint, bring forward, and mine the UTXO's into an ongoing UTXO state database, discarding all old transactions whose outputs have all been spent. Consider it a sort of "coinbase input" reference similar to what was done with BTCP's import of BTC UTXOs on day one, but one that is now continually mined forward with consensus into a database structure. Such databases could be distributed into a network structure, and or held in clients, etc. It may be possible to manage a hashed series of n-week old UTXO datasets, or even move to mining UTXO's forward directly from the transaction stream into an atomic database. Such UTXO database and operations could parcel out its functions to miners, relays, clients, wallets, DHT, Encrypted Overlay Transport and Storage Networks such as I2P, IPFS, etc... as needed for computation, distribution, query, bootstrapping, etc. The development of UTXO databases will immediately cut all future [ir]responsible speculation on the storage question... from the legacy thinking of "all historical transactions needed", down to the more sensible and narrower fact of only "all UTXOs needed"... which is a vastly smaller and slower growing amount of space. Keep in mind that a "currency / cash / gold / etc", purely monetary coins function... do not care about what tx history went into making the current state, only that the current state, the nominal values held in hand for future use over the network, is valid. And that purely monetary coins are sufficient for their own purpose, skipping all the other pile-on design-limiting functions such as token carriage, where so merited for a monetary success if need be. In that case, see below regarding DEX. There seem to be some formation of ways to do UTXO databases as some whitepapers are now speaking to the subject. They are hard to find due to immature terminology and space flooding. Feel free to create and curate a list of such papers for others to refer to. The combination of the following technologies, among others... - Privacy Coin tech (for all the fine reasons, in protocol, by default) - Blocksize and other TX tech (to handle expected transaction rates) - UTXO Database tech (to not blow out the ecosystem later on) - Cross-Chain Distributed Exchange tech (for all the fine reasons) - Secure and Overlay Transport tech integration (for all the fine reasons) - Anything enabling Secure Comms and Meetups (for all the fine reasons) ... should bring the cryptocurrency space into a much better position to tackle, uphold, and carry out the reasons it was created, and the prophecies it is to fulfill. Bitcoin-BTC, and most of today's other coins, may be unlikely ones to introduce such tech, at least not without some laughably embarrasing public backtracking, or such complete reboot and coinbase reinput so as to be new anyway... ever. Coins aren't really pluggably design and feature modular yet, as such, most leaps in tech progress still need to be ground up. With true cross-chain DEX (CCDEX's) combined with the rest of the above tech, it doesn't matter which set of coins end up doing it, users will trade into them, letting all legacies and incapable proposals and failures, rightfully die. Cryptocurrency is moving into its second decade and still presents an extremely rare opportunity. Do not let those windows close due to certain legacy models, say... of FUD, rulers regulating, spying, power, lack of security, self-interested shitcoins, etc... exploit them to win, for all the world's people.

1 0

Google plans to cancel accounts on commercial viability
by Ryan Carboni 15 Nov '19

15 Nov '19

I don't know what that means. If a lawsuit occurs, won't Google have to disclose financial metrics in court? Would this mean that people should have the right to choose their own ad vendor for YouTube? I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't accounts subject to frequent and improper DMCA takedowns (mostly reviewers) have the greatest cost? So Google will probably have to bill hours to each account to be non-arbitrary? But I'm sure Google hires the best lawyers.

2 1

Intel Fucks Up Jump Conditional Code Cache, New ucode
by grarpamp 14 Nov '19

14 Nov '19

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-jcc-gaming&num=1 https://github.com/intel/Intel-Linux-Processor-Microcode-Data-Files Intel is today making public the Jump Conditional Code (JCC) erratum. This is a bug involving the CPU's Decoded ICache where on Skylake and derived CPUs where unpredictable behavior could happen when jump instructions cross cache lines. Unfortunately addressing this error in software comes with a performance penalty but ultimately Intel engineers are working to offset that through a toolchain. Users flock to AMD.

3 6

Cryptocurrency: Photonic Optical Proof of Work
by grarpamp 14 Nov '19

14 Nov '19

https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.05193 Most cryptocurrencies rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) "mining" for resistance to Sybil and double-spending attacks, as well as a mechanism for currency issuance. Hashcash PoW has successfully secured the Bitcoin network since its inception, however, as the network has expanded to take on additional value storage and transaction volume, Bitcoin PoW's heavy reliance on electricity has created scalability issues, environmental concerns, and systemic risks. Mining efforts have concentrated in areas with low electricity costs, creating single points of failure. Although PoW security properties rely on imposing a trivially verifiable economic cost on miners, there is no fundamental reason for it to consist primarily of electricity cost. The authors propose a novel PoW algorithm, Optical Proof of Work (oPoW), to eliminate energy as the primary cost of mining. Proposed algorithm imposes economic difficulty on the miners, however, the cost is concentrated in hardware (capital expense-CAPEX) rather than electricity (operating expenses-OPEX). The oPoW scheme involves minimal modifications to Hashcash-like PoW schemes, inheriting safety/security properties from such schemes. Rapid growth and improvement in silicon photonics over the last two decades has led to the commercialization of silicon photonic co-processors (integrated circuits that use photons instead of electrons to perform specialized computing tasks) for low-energy deep learning. oPoW is optimized for this technology such that miners are incentivized to use specialized, energy-efficient photonics for computation. Beyond providing energy savings, oPoW has the potential to improve network scalability, enable decentralized mining outside of low electricity cost areas, and democratize issuance. Due to the CAPEX dominance of mining costs, oPoW hashrate will be significantly less sensitive to underlying coin price declines.

1 0

Daily Wire's Josh Hammer: "Jew hatred is in the DNA of Europeans" - [PEACE]
by Zenaan Harkness 14 Nov '19

14 Nov '19

>From the "know thine enemies" dept comes a handsome reporter tweeting some basic facts to the world, this one that we all well know about Europeans and our DNA: What Did Daily Wire Writer and Ben Shapiro Employee Josh Hammer Mean by This? http://dstormer6em3i4km.onion/what-did-daily-wire-writer-and-ben-shapiro-em… Josh Hammer, a Daily Wire editor at large, said on Tuesday that “Jew hatred is in the DNA of Europeans.” He deleted the tweet without explanation, but it’s been archived. https://archive.fo/Fd8rI ... Remember to always take it with a grain of salt when Ben Shapiro or one of his goons calls anything anti-Semitic. They believe that all Whites are “inherently anti-Semitic.” — Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) November 13, 2019 That’s certainly one way to look at race – certain races are genetically hardwired for a hatred that is defined as evil, meaning that this race is genetically evil. ... I’m not really seeing that Jew hatred is inherent in European DNA. I am seeing that Christian hatred is inherent in Jewish DNA. I’m also seeing that criminal behavior, perverse sexuality, financial scams, lying and a desire to dominate non-Jewish societies is also inherent in Jewish DNA. But I’m certainly willing to have an open discussion with Daily Wire editor and Ben Shapiro employee Josh Hammer about what behaviors may or may not be hardwired into the DNA of both our races. And I’m not triggered if Josh thinks I’m genetically predisposed to Jew hatred, and hope that he will not be triggered by my beliefs that Jews are genetically predisposed to these behaviors I’ve listed. The thing is: last week I listened to a speech where he said that http://dstormer6em3i4km.onion/groyper-war-zog-strikes-back-as-kooky-kike-be… race is “nothing but melanin content in the skin,” and made the outrageous claim that anyone who disagrees with that statement is stupid and evil. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPyRjTCuCV8 “Race does not have ideals, it’s just a melanin level,” Shapiro declared. “It’s just a skin color or a place of origin. If you think it does, you’re absolutely indistinguishable, you are identical to the identity politics left, to the intersectional left.” ...

1 0

Cryptocurrency: Buy Kryptoez Socks PoS instead of Stupid Rocks, Brave Browser Hits 1.0
by grarpamp 14 Nov '19

14 Nov '19

https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/dvr7fb/got_my_cryptosocks/ https://i.redd.it/dna9s63m8gy31.jpg https://www.mtsocks.com/ProofOfSock https://old.reddit.com/user/mtsocks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-13/the-problem-with-diamond… https://brave.com/brave-launches-next-generation-browser/ Includes crypto rewards micropayment system. https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2019/11/13/bitcoin-swiss-bank-greenlight-re… https://old.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/dvmc8v/former_interpol_director_ca… https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/dvum27/to_paraphrase_what_jay_pow…

1 0

All Activities Monitored: How military drone technology is quietly creeping into policing, business, and everyday life
by grarpamp 14 Nov '19

14 Nov '19

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/all-activities-monitored https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21527328 Around 2006, a holy terror must have seized Iraqi insurgents. It must have seemed that, just as at Homer’s Troy, the gods were watching the battle from above and took sides. Seemingly without regard to whatever precautions they might take, insurgents were being slaughtered left and right — not only those directly confronting American troops or government forces, but even the financiers, couriers, bomb builders, and bomb placers. Death might find insurgents in their cars via Hellfire missile or in their homes in the middle of the night. Friends and compatriots were disappearing, snatched up in the desert or arrested at checkpoints. Precautions like using burner phones or in-person messengers no longer seemed to be working nearly as well. Terrorist and insurgent networks were collapsing, and the numbers of successful attacks against Americans were dropping. Why?

1 0

TPM-FAIL: Trusted Platform Module - Exploited
by grarpamp 14 Nov '19

14 Nov '19

http://tpm.fail/tpmfail.pdf https://github.com/VernamLab/TPM-Fail TPM meets Timing and Lattice Attacks Trusted Platform Module (TPM) serves as a root of trust for the operating system. TPM is supposed to protect our security keys from malicious adversaries like malware and rootkits. Most laptop and desktop computers nowadays come with a dedicated TPM chip, or they use the Intel firmware-based TPM (fTPM) which runs on a separate microprocessor inside the CPU. Intel CPUs support fTPM since the Haswell generation (2013). TPM chips are also used in other computing devices such as cellphones and embedded devices. We discovered timing leakage on Intel firmware-based TPM (fTPM) as well as in STMicroelectronics' TPM chip. Both exhibit secret-dependent execution times during cryptographic signature generation. While the key should remain safely inside the TPM hardware, we show how this information allows an attacker to recover 256-bit private keys from digital signature schemes based on elliptic curves. A team of academics has disclosed today two vulnerabilities known collectively as TPM-FAIL that could allow an attacker to retrieve cryptographic keys stored inside TPMs. The first vulnerability is CVE-2019-11090 and impacts Intel's Platform Trust Technology (PTT). Intel PTT is Intel's fTPM software-based TPM solution and is widely used on servers, desktops, and laptops, being supported on all Intel CPUs released since 2013, starting with the Haswell generation. The second is CVE-2019-16863 and impacts the ST33 TPM chip made by STMicroelectronics. This chip is incredibly popular and is used on a wide array of devices ranging from networking equipment to cloud servers, being one of the few chips that received a CommonCriteria (CC) EAL 4+ classification — which implies it comes with built-in protection against side-channel attacks like the ones discovered by the research team. Unlike most TPM attacks, these ones were deemed practical. A local adversary can recover the ECDSA key from Intel fTPM in 4-20 minutes depending on the access level. We even show that these attacks can be performed remotely on fast networks, by recovering the authentication key of a virtual private network (VPN) server in 5 hours.

1 0

BrBrBr: Corrupt Brazil Swats at Greenwald
by grarpamp 13 Nov '19

13 Nov '19

https://reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/c1glfa/after_exposing_corrupted_bra… https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/06/14/after-exposing-corrupted-brazi… Greenwald and his colleagues published leaked chats from government officials that appear to show justice minister Sérgio Moro was involved in a plot to keep former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, from entering the country's 2018 presidential race. The reporting has already caused controversy in Brazil and forced Moro to answer difficult questions from the public. In addition to physical harm, Greenwald, who is American but lived in Brazil for many years, says powerful members of the Brazilian government are also threatening to have him deported because of his journalism. Greenwald's husband, David Miranda, is a member of the Socialism and Liberty Party, and was elected to Brazil's National Congress last year. https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1139275872840667138 https://twitter.com/carlosjordy/status/1139249465062301699 A Congressman from Bolsonaro's party explicitly threatening me with arrest and/or deportation for reporting on the massive improprieties of Bolsonaro's Justice Minister and the prosecutors who imprisoned Lula. This is their prevailing mentality, laid out explicitly: Assisti agora a um vídeo do Glenn Greenwald debochando do PSL dizendo que o partido amarelou de convidá-lo na Comissão de Segurança. Vamos à verdade: 1 - Eu não estava lá, mas jamais teria deixado q fizessem convite. O convidado não é obrigado a responder perguntas, responde o que quer. Aquilo se tornaria um palco para a esquerda blindá-lo e ele falaria o que quisesse de forma distorcida. 2 - O ideal seria uma convocação, mas que, no caso dele, só seria possível numa CPI, o que eu e @filipebarrost já estamos providenciando coletando assinaturas. 3 - Independente do seu comparecimento ao Congresso, seu caso já está sendo investigado na justiça. Senhor @ggreenwald, não pense que você é um imortal acima do bem e do mal. Você praticou ativismo jornalístico através de um ato criminoso, o que lhe faz cúmplice. 4 - Respeite o País que o recebeu, você não pode afrontar nossas instituições e autoridades, cometendo crimes contra a segurança nacional e não imaginar que pode ser punido criminalmente e DEPORTADO. 5 - Se instaurarmos a CPI, não vale amarelar e recorrer ao STF impetrando HC para não comparecer.

3 3

Microsoft OS Workaround Site "My Digital Life" Still Running
by grarpamp 13 Nov '19

13 Nov '19

https://forums.mydigitallife.net/ ISO links, KMS, howtos, BIOS mods, Apps, etc. Seems popular, been running for years. Windows 98 Universal Product Key: VP9VV-VJW7Q-MHY6W-JK47R-M2KGJ

1 0