- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

[WAR] The clear (+biblical) foundation of Israel - be aware.
by Zenaan Harkness 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

That which we have no awareness of, can certainly impact upon us, our lives and our loved ones and so it can be useful to learn a little. Perhaps this is one of the most important foundations for the fellow Souls of our age to comprehend. Courtesy the ever poignant “The Saker”. Be aware, https://russia-insider.com/en/israels-aggressive-behavior-embodied-and-prop… Israel's Aggressive Behavior is Embodied and Prophesied in the Hebrew Bible Source: The Saker How Biblical is Zionism? http://thesaker.is/how-is-biblical-zionism/ by Laurent Guyénot for the Saker Blog "Even the nuclear policy of Israel has a biblical name: the Samson Option" The biblical mind of Israel’s founding fathers ---------------------------------------------- The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is for the committed Jew as much a record of his ancient origins, the prism through which all Jewish history is interpreted (is not the “Holocaust” a biblical term?), and the unalterable pattern of Israel’s promising future. That is why the Bible, once the “portable fatherland” of the Diaspora Jews as Heinrich Heine put it, remains at the core of the national narrative of the Jewish State, whose founding fathers did not give it any other Constitution. It is true that the earliest prophets of political Zionism — Moses Hess (Rome and Jerusalem, 1862), Leon Pinsker (Auto-Emancipation, 1882) and Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State, 1896) — did not draw their inspiration from the Bible, but rather from the great nationalist spirit that swept through Europe at the end of the 19th century. Pinsker and Herzl actually cared little whether the Jews colonized Palestine or any other region of the globe; the first thought about some land in North America, while the second contemplated Argentina and later Uganda. More important still than nationalism, what drove these intellectual pioneers was the persistence of Judeophobia or anti-Semitism: Pinsker, who was from Odessa, converted during the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II; Herzl, at the height of the Dreyfus affair. Nevertheless, by naming his movement “Zionism,” Herzl himself was plugging it into biblical mythology: Zion is a name used for Jerusalem by biblical prophets. And after Herzl, the founders of the Yishuv (Jewish communities settled in Palestine before 1947) and later of the Jewish State were steeped in the Bible. From their point of view, Zionism was the logical and necessary end of biblical Yahwism. “The Bible is our mandate,” Chaim Weizmann declared at the Peace Conference in Versailles in 1920, and David Ben-Gurion has made clear that he only accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan as a temporary step toward the goal of biblical borders. In Ben-Gurion, Prophet of fire(1983), the biography of the man described as “the personification of the Zionist dream,” Dan Kurzman entitles each chapter with a Bible quote. The preface begins like this: “The life of David Ben-Gurion is more than the story of an extraordinary man. It is the story of a Biblical prophecy, an eternal dream. […] Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind.” For Ben-Gurion, Kurzman writes, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Yet Ben-Gurion had never been to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast. According to the rabbi leading the Bible study group that he attended, Ben-Gurion “unconsciously believed he was blessed with a spark from Joshua’s soul.” “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible,” he used to say.[1] He wrote in his diary in 1948, ten days after declaring independence, “We will break Transjordan [Jordan], bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight — we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo,” then he adds: “This will be in revenge for what they did to our forefathers during biblical times.”[2] Three days after the Israeli invasion of the Sinai in 1956, he declared before the Knesset that what was at stake was “the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon.”[3] Ben-Gurion’s attachment to the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation and the next. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six Day War, wrote a book entitled Living with the Bible (1978) in which he justified the annexation of new territory by the Bible. More recently, Israeli Education minister Naftali Bennett, a proponent of full-scale annexation of the West Bank, did the same.[4] Zionism is biblical by ideology, but also in practice. As Avigail Abarbanel wrote, the Zionist conquerors of Palestine “have been following quite closely the biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. […] For a supposedly non-religious movement it’s extraordinary how closely Zionism […] has followed the Bible.”[5] The paradox is only apparent, because for Zionists, the Bible is not a religious text, but a textbook of history. And so it should be obvious to anybody paying attention that Israel’s behavior on the international scene cannot be understood without a deep inquiry into the Bible’s underlying ideology. Prophecies and geopolitics -------------------------- Only by taking account of the biblical roots of Zionism can one understand why Zionism has never been a nationalist movement like others. It could not be, as Gilad Atzmon remarked, from the moment it defined itself as a Jewish movement, aimed at creating a “Jewish state”.[6] Jewish exceptionalism is a biblical concept that has no equivalent in any other ethnic or religious culture. Neither can Zionism be correctly assessed as a form of colonialism, despite Jabotinsky’s effort to do so. For colonialism seeks not to expel the natives, but to exploit them. If Zionism is colonialism, it can only be in the sense of the colonization of the world by Israel, according to the program laid out by Isaiah: “The riches of the sea will flow to you, the wealth of the nations come to you” (60:5); “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (60:16); “You will feed on the wealth of nations, you will supplant them in their glory” (61:5-6); “For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you will perish, and the nations will be utterly destroyed” (60:12) Christians find hope in Isaiah that, some day, all peoples “will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles. Nations will not lift sword against nation, no longer will they learn how to make war” (Isaiah 2:4). But more important to Zionists are the previous verses, which describe these messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob,” when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.” No wonder Isaiah is the biblical prophet most often quoted by Zionists. In a statement published in the magazine Look on January 16, 1962, Ben-Gurion predicted for the next 25 years: “All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[7] The launching of the Iraq War was a decisive step toward that goal of a new world order headquartered in Jerusalem. It was the context for a “Jerusalem Summit” held in October 2003 in the highly symbolic King David Hotel, to seal an alliance between Jewish and Christian Zionists. The “Jerusalem Declaration” signed by its participants declared Jerusalem “the key to the harmony of civilizations,” replacing the United Nations that had become “a tribalized confederation hijacked by Third World dictatorships”: “Jerusalem’s spiritual and historical importance endows it with a special authority to become a center of world’s unity. [. . .] We believe that one of the objectives of Israel’s divinely-inspired rebirth is to make it the center of the new unity of the nations, which will lead to an era of peace and prosperity, foretold by the Prophets.” Three acting Israeli ministers spoke at the summit, including Benjamin Netanyahu. Richard Perle, the guest of honor, received on this occasion the Henry Scoop Jackson Award.[8] When Israeli leaders claim that their vision of the global future is based on the (Hebrew) Bible, we should take them seriously and study the Bible. It might help, for example, to know that according to Deuteronomy Yahweh plans to deliver to Israel “seven nations greater and mightier than [it],” adding: “you must utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them, and show no mercy to them. You shall not make marriages with them…” (7:1-2). As for the kings of these seven nations, “you shall make their name perish from under heaven” (7:24). The destruction of the “Seven Nations,” also mentioned in Joshua 24:11, is considered a mitzvah in rabbinic Judaism, included by the great Maimonides in his Book of Commandments,[9] and it has remained a popular motif in Jewish culture, known to every Israeli school child. It is also part of the Neocon agenda for World War IV (as Norman Podhoretz names the current global conflict in World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, 2007). General Wesley Clark, former commandant of NATO in Europe, wrote in his book Winning Modern Wars (2003), and repeated in numerous occasions, that one month after September 11, 2001, as he was paying a visit to Paul Wolfowitz, a Pentagon general showed him a memo “that describes how we’re gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan and finishing off with Iran.”[10] In his September 20, 2001 speech, President Bush also targeted seven “rogue states”, but included Cuba and North Korea instead of Lebanon and Somalia. The likely explanation to that discrepancy is that Bush or his entourage refused to include Lebanon and Somalia, but that the number seven was retained for its symbolic value, as an encrypted signature. Without question, the neocons who were writing Bush’s war agenda were Zionists of the most fanatical and Machiavellian kind. But the neocon viper’s nest is not the only place to look for crypto-Zionists infiltrated in the highest spheres of US foreign and military affairs. Consider, for example, that Wesley Clark is the son of Benjamin Jacob Kanne and the proud descendant of a lineage of rabbis. It is hard to believe that he never heard about the Bible’s “seven nations”? Is Clark himself, together with the Amy Goodmans who interviewed him, trying to write history in biblical terms, while blaming these wars on the Pentagon’s warmongers? What’s going on, here? A lesson from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah -------------------------------------------- To understand how the crypto-Zionists have hijacked the Empire’s military power into proxy wars, a lesson can be learned from Book of Ezra and its sequel, the Book of Nehemiah. At the time of Ezra, the imperial power was Persia. After the Persians had conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, some of the exiles and their descendants (42,360 people with their 7,337 servants and 200 male and female singers, according to Ezra 2:64-67) returned to Jerusalem under the protection of King Cyrus, with the project of rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem. Thus begins the Book of Ezra: “Yahweh roused the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia to issue a proclamation and to have it publicly displayed throughout his kingdom: ‘Cyrus king of Persia says this, Yahweh, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and has appointed me to build him a temple in Jerusalem, in Judah.’” (Ezra 1:1-2). For acting on behalf of Yahweh, Cyrus is bestowed the title of God’s “Anointed” (Mashiah) in Isaiah 45:1. “Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings: […] It is for the sake of my servant Jacob and of Israel my chosen one, that I have called you by your name, have given you a title though you do not know me. […] Though you do not know me, I have armed you.” (Isaiah 45:1-5) A succeeding Persian emperor, Darius, confirmed Cyrus’ edict, authorizing the rebuilding of the Temple, and ordering gigantic burnt offerings financed by “the royal revenue.” Anyone resisting the new theocratic power backed by Persia, “a beam is to be torn from his house, he is to be impaled on it and his house is to be reduced to a rubbish-heap for his offense” (Ezra 6:11). Then another Persian king, Artaxerxes, is supposed to have granted Ezra authority to lead “all members of the people of Israel in my kingdom, including their priests and Levites, who freely choose to go to Jerusalem,” and to rule over “the whole people of Trans-Euphrates [district encompassing all territories West to the Euphrates]” (7:11-26). In 458 BCE, the priest Ezra went from Babylon to Jerusalem, accompanied by some 1,500 followers. Carrying with him the newly redacted Torah, Ezra called himself the “Secretary of the Law of the God of heaven” (7:21). He was soon joined by Nehemiah, a Persian court official of Judean origin. The edicts of Cyrus, Darius and Artaxerxes are fake. No historian believe them authentic. But the fact that Persian kings granted to a clan of wealthy Levites legal authority for establishing a theocratic semi-autonomous state in Palestine seems historical. What did these proto-Zionists give the Persian kings in return? The Bible does not say, but historians believe that the Judeans exiles in Babylon had won the favor of the Persians by conspiring to help them conquer the city.[11] What is of interest in this biblical narrative is the blueprint for the Zionist strategy of influencing the Empire’s foreign policy for its own advantage. In the late 19th century, the empire was British. Its foreign policy in the Middle East was largely shaped by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Born in a family of Marranos converted back to Judaism in Venice, Disraeli can be considered a forerunner of Zionism, since, well before Theodor Herzl, he tried to include the “restoration of Israel” in the Berlin Congress’ agenda, and hoped to convince the Ottoman Sultan to concede to Palestine as an autonomous Jewish province. He failed, but succeeded in putting the Suez Canal under British control, through funding from his friend Lionel Rothschild (an operation which also consolidated the Rothschilds’ control over the Bank of England). That was the first step in binding British interest and fate to the Middle-East[12]. In short, Disraeli was a modern-day Ezra or Nehemiah, capable of steering the Empire’s policy according to the Jewish agenda of the conquest of Palestine, a dream he had cherished ever since his first trip to Palestine in 1830, at the age of 26, and which he had expressed through the hero of his first novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy: “My wish is a national existence which we have not. My wish is the Land of Promise and Jerusalem and the Temple, all we forfeited, all we have yearned after, all for which we have fought, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs.” A quarter of a century after Disraeli, Theodor Herzl also failed to convince the Sultan. It therefore became necessary that the Ottoman Empire disappear and the cards be redistributed. Zionists then played the British against the Ottomans and, by means now well-documented, obtained from the former the Balfour Declaration (in fact a mere letter addressed by Secretary of State Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild). But when the British started to limit Jewish immigration in Palestine in the 1930s, the Zionists turned to the rising new Imperial power: the United States. Today, the stranglehold of Zionists on US imperial policy is such that a few Jewish neocons can pull the US into a series of wars against Israel’s enemies with a single false flag attack. The capacity of Israel to hijack the Empire’s foreign and military policy requires that a substantial Jewish elite remain in the US. Even Israel’s survival is entirely dependent on the influence of the Zionist power complex in the United States (euphemistically called the “pro-Israel lobby”). That is also a lesson learnt from Ezra and Nehemiah’s time: Nehemiah himself retained his principal residence in Babylone and, for centuries after, the kingdom of Israel was virtually ruled by the Babylonian exiles. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Babylon remained the center of universal Judaism. The comparison was made by Jacob Neusner in A History of the Jews in Babylonia(1965), and by Max Dimont in Jews, God and History (1962). The American Jews who prefer to remain in the United States rather than emigrating to Israel are, Dimont argued, as essential to the community as the Babylonian Jews who declined the invitation to return to Palestine in the Persian era: “Today, as once before, we have both an independent State of Israel and the Diaspora. But, as in the past, the State of Israel today is a citadel of Judaism, a haven of refuge, the center of Jewish nationalism where dwell only two million of the world’s twelve million Jews. The Diaspora, although it has shifted its center through the ages with the rise and fall of civilizations, still remains the universal soul of Judaism.”[13] Conclusion ---------- In the words of the Zionists themselves, including Herzl himself, Zionism was supposed to be the “final solution” to the Jewish question[14]. In 1947, the whole world hoped that it would be, except for Arab leaders who warned against it. But Israel’s existence has only resulted in changing the “Jewish question” into the “Zionist question”: the question about the true ambitions of Israel. Part of the answer is to be found in the Hebrew Bible. The Zionist question is the Biblical question. Zionists themselves tell us so. Their mouths are full of the Bible. On March 3, 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dramatized in front of the American Congress his deep phobia of Iran by referring to the biblical Book of Esther (the only Bible story that makes no mention of God, incidently). It is worth quoting the heart of his rhetorical appeal to a US strike against Iran: “We’re an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we’ll read the Book of Esther. We’ll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved. Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us.”[15] Netanyahu managed to schedule his address to the Congress on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy end of the Book of Esther — the slaughter of 75,000 Persians, women and children included. This typical speech by the head of the State of Israel is clear indication that the behavior of that nation on the international scene cannot be understood without a deep inquiry into the Bible’s underlying ideology. Such is the main objective of my new book, From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, translated by Kevin Barrett. May those who still want to believe that Zionism has nothing to do with the Bible think twice. Even the nuclear policy of Israel has a biblical name: the Samson Option.[16] And let them read the Prophets: “And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths.” (Zechariah 14:12) Notes: 1. Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, p. 17-18, 22, 26-28. 2. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2007, p. 144. 3. Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 10. 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Png17wB_omA 5. Avigail Abarbanel, “Why I left the Cult,” October 8, 2016, on mondoweiss.net 6. Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto, Skyscraper, 2017, pp. 66-67. 7. David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116 8. Official website: www.jerusalemsummit.org/eng/declaration.php 9. http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/961561/jewish/Positive-Comman… 10. Wesley Clark, Winning Modern Wars, Public Affairs, 2003, p. 130. 11. For example, Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org) vol. 1, p. 343. 12. On Disraeli’s proto-Zionist policy, read my article : https://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2015/02/13/515416tracking-the-roots-of-zion… 13. Quoted in Michael Collins Piper, The New Babylon: Those Who Reign Supreme, American Free Press, 2009, p. 27 14. The first Zionist association inspired by Herzl’s program, the National-jüdische Vereinigung Köln, declared as its goal in 1897: “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question lies therefore in the establishment of the Jewish State” (quoted in Isaiah Friedman, Germany, Turkey, and Zionism 1897–1918, Transaction Publishers, 1998, p. 17). Herzl wrote: “I believe I have found the solution of the Jewish Question. Not a solution, but the solution, the only one,” repeating further that Zionism was “the only possible, final, and successful solution of the Jewish Question” (The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1, p. 118). 15. “The Complete Transcript of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress,” on www.washingtonpost.com 16. Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991.

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USA
by grarpamp 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPhWR4d3FJQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFUFw1GH6ic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEH_ms8d1ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwNiXABt1JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M11SvDtPBhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3zdIHDTbg0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9GSF3ROa58 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9BNoNFKCBI USA? Music?

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Ecuador Handing Over Assange To UK
by grarpamp 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

https://theintercept.com/2018/07/21/ecuador-will-imminently-withdraw-asylum… https://www.rt.com/news/433783-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-uk/ https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/989122/julian-assange-wikileaks-ecu… https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ecuador-in-talks-to-evict-assange-its-st… "A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the President's office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to the Intercept that Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement to hand over Assange to the UK within the next several weeks. The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17582652 https://news.slashdot.org/story/18/07/21/0347241/ecuador-will-be-handing-as… https://twitter.com/julianassange https://twitter.com/wikileaks https://www.justice4assange.com/ http://unity4j.com/ https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/19/inside-wikileaks-working-with-the-pub… Alt info http://julianpaulassange.com/

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Benefits of Censorship - My Police State - on the books, nearly implemented here in Australia
by Zenaan Harkness 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

So true, you know you love it ... aahm, or something. It's funny, but so true it's, FIRETRUUUUUUUUUUCK!!! My Police State https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlUQMH19BkQ And in the same bag of delights, censorship - Alex Jones and InfoWars just got done triple time: https://dailystormer.name/alex-jones-banned-from-youtube-and-everything-els… even YouPorn has banned him (yes YouPorn, censorship is exactly what you need, right? - irony of firetrucking ironies here!): https://www.rt.com/usa/435355-porn-sites-alex-jones/ yet this has had a real benefit - Alex Jones/ InfoWars is naming the JewTube "War On White People" policy - and added bonus, he gets exactly 6 Million new subscribers in 48 hours (well, 5.6 million, but who's counting when your grampappy is a lampshade in the corner?): https://dailystormer.name/alex-jones-gains-exactly-6-million-new-subscriber… Nice to see folks realising that the people are the platform. Repeat after me folks: The people --are-- the platform. and not some billion-dollar funded shitty tech platform - and YouTube, Google, FaceBook and Twitter are indeed shitty by design as they each centralise the power to censor, so “ipso shitty censor facto”‼

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https://followmehere.com/
by jim bell 09 Aug '18

09 Aug '18

Assassination Markets for Trump and Others Are On the Blockchain 26 Jul 18 ‘Earlier this month, the non-profit Forecast Foundation launched its Augur protocol on the Ethereum network in a bid to create the first blockchain-based betting platform. Now, Augur is hosting several wagers where users bet on when a public figure will die, with a pot of digital money going to whoever makes the correct guess. This type of betting is referred to as an “assassination market” because it arguably incentivizes someone to guarantee a win by offing the person themselves. On the Augur marketplace, Motherboard found open bets on the deaths of a number of public figures, including Betty White, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett. Other events were also bet on as well, such as whether SpaceX will complete a crewed flight beyond Earth orbit this year. Most of these betting pools had few or no bets on the books at the time of writing, but some betting pools, including one predicting Donald Trump’s death this year, had dozens of trades. These prediction pools are called assassination markets because they arguably incentivize bettors to make their predictions come true by taking matters into their own hands. Cryptoanarchist Jim Bell introduced the concept in a paper called “Assassination Politics” in the mid-1990s. Bell imagined that the anonymity afforded by modern encryption techniques and the advent of digital money would allow for political assassinations to be incentivized and carried out anonymously. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have arguably created a perfect environment for Bell’s assassination politics to take shape….’

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Overlay Network Designs and the Odds of Voids, Link Crypto [was: AP, latency]
by grarpamp 08 Aug '18

08 Aug '18

>> > for other stuff...do you have to ask? What sort of system do you think should be used for coordinating 'criminal' activity, instead of streaming super full SHD video for retards? > And the answer is : some sort of 'high latency' mixing network. And interestingly enough such a network doesn't seem to exist, although it seems to me it would require less resources than something like tor. And nobody seems to be worried about having or not having that kind of network, which strikes me as odd... > What I was trying to say is that, if the use case is 'criminal activity', then using a 'low latency' network like tor which provides centralized 'hidden' services is a not a good idea. It's more like a recipe for disaster. https://www.aclu.org/files/natsec/nsa/Tor%20Stinks.pdf If the mix or other network design is doing it's job, programmed delay, being a part of observed latency, might not end up mattering much to security. ie: Think of latency as the clock speed of the network. The job of passing around cells from here to there is a compute task, a fixed todo list set into instructions. Doesn't matter whether your job completes in 10 seconds, or 10 days, or with each instruction artificially delayed by a billion nop's on the fast cpu. Your cpu can still be probed and watched for months regardless how long it takes, so it doesn't seem that waiting n time units before passing a cell from a to b, b to c, c to d, will help in itself, because the network, or your path over it is not guaranteed to be full. Enough of those odds of empty voids happening at the right points, the ones your data is moving over, and you're hosed. If you've got all this idle time, might as well fill the mix, an actual defensive move. Zen's remindful blurb something others suggested for longer, me included. It really needs cross checked against available research, and researched into development if it works.. Would also like to see work on opensource IETF standard for all physical ports on all network hardware, each port having independant full time random keyed link encryption with tamper alerts, and full time fill to the capacity of the link with random data, baked in the silicon and silently on by default out of the box. Limited to opposing crypto suites, say three with a q resistant one. The silicon, firmware, and software required is expected to be trivial cost, like $1/port when applied globally. That'll seriously fuck with the vampires on the wire who don't have legal authority to force you to turn it off, or to particularly regulate your hardware, which in the western world is many jurisdictions. To wit, apple secure enclave is still thought by many to be resistant and live years later in T2 and A11. No, operators don't need to turn it off to debug their net, they copy the port above the MAC PHY of the chaff at the logical layer to another port. Which also is a human action which can't currently be forced, in any sane regime, and fishing for win with an illegal general warrant.

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Bug in cryptocurrency platform Augur meant users could be duped into losing money
by jim bell 08 Aug '18

08 Aug '18

https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/08/07/augur-fake-data-bug/ A massive vulnerability has been discovered in the decentralized betting platform Augur. Hackers have been able to feed users incorrect data and game the system. Everything shown by the app was susceptible to faking, from transactions to wallet addresses – even the markets could have been forgeries. Augur is a wonderful place where you can place wetwork orders for high-profile figures like US President Donald Trump and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It’s a next-generation betting platform that allows wagers on pretty much anything. Users buy shares in the outcome of a specific event, like a sports match or political election. Buy shares in the right outcome and you win, with prizes being paid in Ethereum. This brand of attack is called frame-jacking, which exploits and manipulates HTML code that controls how data is displayed when it is syndicated from external sources. A user being frame-jacked will be viewing the ‘correct’ domain, but the data shown will be incorrect and misleading, funnelled in from a different location – not directly from Augur. The security researcher who submitted the vulnerability report to HackerOne described its effects quite simply: “User visits a link from internet, his Augur application data is replaced by an attacker then – market data, Ethereum addresses, everything.” Augur’s native cryptocurrency, REP, is even distributed for settling outstanding bets by confirming their outcome. Truly, from top to bottom, the entire platform relies on having accurate, up-to-date information, users need to be able to trust the data they’re being fed. The decentralized design of its back-end is supposed to maintain trust. In this case, though, users have been let down by the developers choice to store certain files related to its UI locally, leading to their exposure. Such design choices often breed single points of failure. Hackers were able to access sensitive code as it was stored locally, something usually avoided for the security concerns it raises. The researcher also explored possible consequences of such bugs, after disagreeing with its medium-grade severity classification by the Augur team. In the case it is discovered by someone not participating in bug bounty program. What would he do? Well, the logical step in the case someone wanted to exploit it would be, for example, sending out phishing links to Augur users … replacing all the Ethereum addresses with his own, [leading to] fund loss. Someone could find it and just create post a Medium or somewhere else, describing how is it easy to hijack Augur’s UI data. […] This stupid, simple, small, and critical bug was found in Augur’s bug bounty program, the one with very high bonuses for critical bugs and very low expectations of such bugs being actually found. In the end, though, the developers invariably maintained their position, primarily due to it being an error in the UI, not the underlying platform. Usually, these types of bugs are worth around $1,500 – but a spokesperson later clarified the researcher received $5,000. The vulnerability has since been patched, so users are urged to update their Augur client. Really, though, this is just more proof that HackerOne’s white-hat ecosystem has become quite lucrative. Bug bounties are being paid out almost every day – we recently reported on one set of bounties distributed to those finding kinks in the code of anonymous cryptocurrency Monero. Update 19:09 UTC, August 7: A spokesperson from Forecast Foundation, which built and maintains Augur, has since reached out. They clarified that, in the end, the security researcher was paid $5,000, diverting from the prices set by its bug bounty program. “This is done on a discretionary basis, and this payout was double the bug bounty program’s max payout for UI issues of $2,500.” Published August 7, 2018 — 16:09 UTC

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Re: [Cryptography] Krugman blockchain currency skepticism
by grarpamp 08 Aug '18

08 Aug '18

On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 7:24 PM, Bill Frantz <frantz(a)pwpconsult.com> wrote: > OK, I can't resist any longer. Let's look at some payment and store of value > systems: Ok... > Gold metal: > Terrible for electronic payment. Transferring electronic stock in GLD, or other forms of gold securities, works fine, is slow and a lot of paperwork, but most would be terribly happy to receive it instead of being stiffed. > Likely to be accepted anywhere fiat currencies are weak. Like Venezuela, Greece, Zimbabwe, etc... anyplace undergoing any volatility or inflation event, now or past, since gold was removed / banned from standard worldwide... anyone have links to news articles where any economically significant fraction of the affected populous in such places was carrying around and using gold instead of wheelbarrows full of fiat? None? > Can be converted to fiat currencies where they are strong Everything is convertible to any other thing, wherever and whenever, doesn't mean you or your counterparty will want to, at times it might be best to drop it in the rubbish, or keep it. > Can be converted to fiat currencies, but the transaction may have to be reported. "Have to" vs "is" vs "you volunteered" info are different things. > If you become a refugee, gold can be carried with you. Up to your limited capacity to securely carry weight and bulk. > Can be stolen at gunpoint. Carry a gun. > Doesn't earn interest. It can. > The gold standard. :-) Though fair a meme nonetheless, with cryptocurrency a challenger approaching from a distance. > Dollar, Euro, Pound Sterling (well regarded fiat currencies): > Can be used with electronic payment systems. Not before converting that paper / metal / poly physical into something entirely different... digits in a database. > Likely to be accepted anywhere. > Easy to convert to other currencies Not really, it's a pain to convert back, assuming you even knew how to authenticate and wanted the foreign physical in the first place.. > If you become a refugee, notes are transportable and accounts can be accessed > if not frozen. (Pick a good jurisdiction for that account.) They don't let you bring in "good" fiats, they keep it for themselves. You're not funding that account electronically through the tight regime you have to refugee from. Nor are you transporting their junk it past all their checkpoint thieves on the way out, nor is it useful on the other side. > gunpoint, accounts can be protected from that attack. Thug points to your / bankers dome. Govt thugs do same, civil forfeiture, etc. > Relatively stable in value over the long term Nice smooth steady loss and redistribution, lovely. Case Shiller Index... 2007 deja vu and pop before long. > Accounts can earn interest. But don't, not enough to even beat inflation these days, a terrible SOV and investment. > What world commerce runs on. Can run on cryptocurrencies. > Bitcoin: > Not accepted everywhere. Can be. > the transaction is recorded in the blockchain, leaving a record. Which if using cryptographically private ZKP blockchain like Zcash (ZEC), is currently thought to be entirely private thus off the record. > Can be converted to fiat currencies for > wide acceptance everywhere In the future, Neo, you won't have to. > If you become a refugee, transport is limited by the electronic devices you can > take with you. False. Memorize your brainwallet passphrase. Encode keys on or in your body, clothing, luggage, books. Ship ahead, or shard among people, or stash online. Limitless secure options. > Wildly changing value over the recent short term FUD from anti's who don't understand introduction of new things, decentralized cryptocurrencies into free markets, all covered before. And Impressive increasing value over any long term window beyond a year. > and no long-term track record. Nine years and counting, impressive for something that's pissing off and disrupting fiat govt / banks worldwide. Hardly Pokemon or Linden Dollars. > Can't earn interest Value on "deposit" is value invested. Investments can earn. Unless you invest them in shitty things like Lehman Brothers. While cryptocurrency rising in adoption phase, it eats all others, so no sane person can or will pay returns denominated in it, until there are entirely cryptocurrency based businesses, investment vehicles and cycles, or if its rate of rise falls below other vehicles. Better to just buy / sell / short it directly. > Not widely used in commerce. Nothing stopping that but you. > Eggs: > (from the Economist Buttonwood column 7/21/2018 on hyperinflation in > Venezuela): Not usable for electronic payment. Generally accepted for > payment in Venezuela. Can be sold as a commodity in most locations and > converted to other currencies. Not normally tracked by governments. Hard > boiling recommended should you become a refugee to improve transportability. > Destroyed by fire, but small fires may help them make a good meal. > Relatively stable value over the long term, but individual eggs spoil in a > matter of weeks to months. Can't earn interest. Used in commerce in limited > locations suffering hyperinflation. Can directly provide human nourishment. Can earn interest... give recently fertilized eggs to someone to hatch under contract, you make eggs in return. I'd peg / tether your price in cryptocurrency for a dozen eggs to each of every one of today's hundreds of cryptocurrencies, at today's exchange rate, provided you buy all the eggs you eat each month, from me, at the aforementioned static crypto/egg peg, using the cryptocurrency of my choice at each purchase, for the rest of your life. You'll always pay the same amount of whichever crypto for your eggs, zero volatility, guaranteed. I reserve the right to add any new cryptocurrency at any time pegging it for you at that time, and to terminate contract at any time by delivering a dozen hens a laying to you. Feel free to hedge your backend with Tether (USDT)... https://tether.to/ "Every day that goes by and [Cryptocurrency] hasn't collapsed due to legal or technical problems, that brings new information to the market. It increases the chance of [Cryptocurrency's] eventual success and justifies a higher price." -- Hal Finney Most people are simply closed minded old dog programmed statist sheeple incapable of free thought outside their box (TV box too). That's why they can't offer any debate sustainable reason why decentralized cryptocurrencies *cannot* be used as money. And why the cryptocurrency crowd, having made that leap, offers numerous reasons, designs, updates, and ways in which they *can*. For that matter, seems it'd be a lot more fun crypto coding completely novel decentralized cryptocurrencies, than off in a corner trying to digitize some crusty old fiat under orders from a government / banks with no freedom to change that model :) [bcc cypherpunks]

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Innovation in Crypto Gambling and the Potential Legislation Nightmare
by jim bell 08 Aug '18

08 Aug '18

https://coincentral.com/crypto-gambling-legislation-nightmare/ Digital currencies and their underlying blockchain technology have created new possibilities in a world where almost all online trends have become potential monetization ventures. And now, crypto gambling has enabled gamblers to participate in markets never realized before, such as placing assassination bets on celebrities and political candidates. Such is the level of potential and democratization offered by Augur, a market prediction platform that utilizes cryptocurrencies and runs on the blockchain. It enables users to place bets on an infinite range of betting outcomes only limited by one’s imagination. It also places no geographical restrictions and provides the added value of anonymity. Right now, Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and Warren Buffett are three individuals who already have assassination bets placed on them on the Augur platform. The Trump assassination wager, for example, reads, “Will Donald Trump (President of The USA) be killed at any point during 2018?” Developed by the Forecast Foundation, Augur allows you to create an event to predict, build a market for it, and then trade shares based on the outcome. The events range from election predictions to natural disasters to market crashes. Once a user wins an outcome, he can create a report based on the bet, and other users can agree or disagree with it. Winning bets are paid out after the market is resolved. The gambling platform uses the Ethereum cryptocurrency for trading. Of course, there is the real fear that bets on outcomes such as assassinations could trigger related events in reality. However, these types of wagers have garnered insignificant funding, and offer little incentive for someone to get inspiration from the bets.Legislative Issues That said, the prediction platform does cause another problem. It blurs the difference between online gambling and prediction markets. The former is particularly popular on Augur and based on event predictions, but is prohibited by numerous countries such as China, the United Arab Emirates, Brunei, Japan, Cyprus, and others. The problem lies in the fact that even if Augur is found to have broken the law by facilitating gambling, or other illegal activities, there are few ways to enforce it. There are also fears based on the platform’s highly unregulated nature, given that Forecast Foundation, its developer, has actually distanced itself from ownership of the protocol, which it describes as open-source software. Its developers also highlight that they have no control of the peer to peer platform, and have no access to user private keys or personally identifying information. This includes legal names, national ID numbers, email addresses, and wallet balances. The situation highlights the jurisdictional powerlessness that can be brought on by such a platform in the face of a burgeoning gambling market, catalyzed by popular events like the World Cup. In regard to the United States, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is investigating whether Augur’s activities fall under its jurisdiction. STAY IN THE KNOW The Crypto Gambling World The crypto gambling world has been growing steadily over the years, as more and more people become acquainted with cryptocurrencies. In 2013, 50 percent of all bitcoin transactions involved gambling, and since 2014 over 3.7 million BTC valued at $26 billion have been used on betting platforms. And during the months of June and July this year, there was a significant uptick in crypto gambling activity. This was especially true in countries where online gambling is illegal, spurred on by the World Cup. However, the trend also revealed the potential for abuse given cryptocurrencies’ and their blockchain technology’s unregulated nature. In China, authorities arrested six suspects suspected of running a World Cup gambling ring based in Guangdong province that had about $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency bets. This is according to a statement released by Chinese authorities. The scheme, based on the dark web, had been accepting Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Litecoin for 8 months before its operators were nabbed. It lured in more than 300,000 players from different countries and had about 8,000 affiliate marketers to support the network. The growth of such an operation is an indicator of just how huge a platform such as Augur can become, based on the marginalized market it targets. In countries such as China, for example, both cryptocurrency trading and gambling are illegal. As such, a decentralized betting platform such as Augur requires a regulator. However, it markets itself as a ‘prediction market’, which is a grey area for many countries where gambling is deemed illegal, and so a few legislative issues related to this are bound to crop up. Moreover, it allows a user to create an event, bet on it, and build a market for it. As such, the user can be a creator, marketer and potential beneficiary as the gambler, all at the same time. This requires a whole new set of complex legislation. In Britain, for example, the U.K. Gambling Commission (UKGC) classifies a peer-to-peer protocol such as Augur as a remote betting intermediary. However, the classification is not comprehensive enough to conclusively categorize it as such. This is considering the evolved nature of user participation, its underpinning technology, and when the regulations were first set, which was in 2013. Crowd Wisdom Potential According to Nolan Bauerle, Director of Research at Coindesk, prediction markets have the potential to tap crowd wisdom in a way few platforms can and have been largely been misunderstood. According to the executive, they would be an invaluable resource if they were allowed to grow to a global scale, and could potentially provide rare insight on industry trends.

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Re: [Cryptography] Krugman blockchain currency skepticism
by grarpamp 08 Aug '18

08 Aug '18

On Mon, Aug 6, 2018 at 4:11 PM, Benjamin Kreuter <brk7bx(a)virginia.edu> wrote: > On Mon, 2018-08-06 at 14:11 +0800, jamesd(a)echeque.com wrote: > As others have asked, what is the problem we want to solve? The > beginning of this thread was a proposal that the problem is that the > government might target an activist group's finances. Now it sounds > like you are talking about the government trying to attack the entire > payment system. That is indeed a valid problem. Among many others in many sectors and applications. >> A crypto currency needs to be centerless - it needs to able to >> survive the seizure of key servers by a hostile powerful party. True, a properly decentralized cryptocurrency has no such seizable / sueable servers. Decentralization is under attack in more ways than most people realize, not just by the purposeful noise deluge of junk / centralized coins, tokens, ico's... but also by very insidious methods. As an example... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BZoKH-hX_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKYEQVPklLI https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bitcoin+censorship https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/informative_btc_vs_… Whether you're a user, code / crypto developer, business, whatever... you need to understand these things and be able to spot them, call them out, and exchange and adopt away from them once they happen. In the cryptocurrency space, there is no birthright, let alone against treason, or any other lesser offense. A bit more from the series... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOZaLbUUZUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgts1qb0hLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGrUOLsC9cw > Get back to me when the Internet itself cannot be shut down by the > government. For so long as free speech, encryption, and overlay networks exist, cryptocurrency and the internet cannot be shutdown. If you accept, either personally or as a populace, the shutting of your connection and or the disablement of your crypto, for mere agnostic tool use, and for no provable reason otherwise, then you're fucked. If the Four Hoursemen of the Infocalypse didn't do it already, then the only thing left is a bonafide threat to the existance of government itself... to its taxes collected by force. Once people worldwide start to figure out they can bypass the redundancy, inefficiency, non choice, war, etc of governments by moving their transactions onto the encrypted blockchain networks... that's the last game... you either sheeple out forever into a questionable existance, or make your stand. Don't be a sheeple.. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=banks+fear+bitcoin https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=governments+fear+bitcoin [bcc cypherpunks]

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