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Guccifer Arrested and Archive
by John Young 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

http://cryptome.org/2014/01/guccifer-arrested.htm Guccifer Archive (~7GB) http://pastebin.com/ph02cfxw

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Live Q&A with Edward Snowden: Thursday 23rd January, 8pm GMT, 3pm EST
by Alex J. Martin 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden/ "Edward Snowden will be answering questions submitted by the public on his official support site, freesnowden.is <http://www.freesnowden.is>, this Thursday 23 January at 8pm GMT, 3pm EST. The support site is run by The Courage Foundation and is the only endorsed Snowden Defence Fund. <http://freesnowden.is/donate/index.html> This is the first Snowden live chat since June 2013 and will last for an hour starting at 8pm GMT, 3pm EST. Questions can be submitted on twitter on the day of the event using the #AskSnowden hashtag. Edward Snowden's responses will appear at http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden The live chat comes exactly a week after US President Barack Obama gave an address in response to the public concerns raised by Edward Snowden's revelations about US surveillance practices. In the live chat, Edward Snowden is expected to give his first reaction to the President's speech. Courage (formerly the Journalistic Source Protection Defence Fund) is a trust, audited by accountants Derek Rothera & Company in the UK, for the purpose of providing legal defence and campaign aid to journalistic sources. It is overseen by an unrenumerated committee of trustees. Edward Snowden is its first recipient. freesnowden.is <http://www.freesnowden.is> was commissioned by the trustees of Courage to provide information on the threats Edward Snowden faces and what can be done to support him, and details all revelations made to date <http://freesnowden.is/revelations/index.html> in a convenient central archive."

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The Enquirer
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

THE CYPHERPUNK ENQUIRER "Just when we thought we were out, they drag us back in ..." Recently reviewed documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal that, following the discovery of large quantities of pornography on hard drives retrieved from the Abbottabad compound where Osama bin Laden was assassinated, the NSA became concerned that al Queda was using steganographic techniques to hide various communications within the jpgs and animated gifs, and began a program (known internally as 'Project Creampie') to collect all the pornography on the internet into one giant database, presently located at the new NSA data storage center in Bluffdale, Utah, that could be searched by various interns and subcontractors. Progress has apparently been slowed due to subcontractor Hewitt Packard's problems in designing and building a computer keyboard impervious to "precious bodily fluids". In response to the newly discovered NSA obsession with feelthy peectures, the old al-queda.net NSA bait URL has been changed to porn-are-us.org. Responding to charges of 'language-ism', the Obfuscated C contest opened itself to languages other than just C this year, and the clear winner in the English category was our own John Young of cryptome.org. "We don't have a clue what he's saying," the nominating committee stated, "but we sure as hell know what he means." The judging committee was impressed by Mr. Young's ability to be almost totally incomprehensible while still getting his point across, and by the fact that he had obviously attained bootstrap status, and in addition is Turing complete. The debate over whether Mr. Young qualifies as P or NP has yet to be resolved. In a shout-out to the old DEFCON ritual of playing 'Spot the Fed', the RSA Conference has announced a contest to 'Spot Tim May', the winner receiving an 'I Outed Tim May' tee shirt and a personal bodyguard for the conference duration. Interest appears to be limited due to the boycott. After a long absence, the Cypherpunks steering committee, due to recent revelations about NSA spying, has once again opened One Time Pad season. The early leader appears to be Ian Goldberg's (of UC Berkeley's 'Glow in the Dark Campanile' fame) proposal to distribute OTP bits via entangled photons, awaiting only Phillip Hallam-Baker's work on developing a room-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate. Open source programmers have already initiated a Kickstarter campaign to develop a delivery method for the distribution of OTPs that would avoid the internet completely and still be RFC 1149, 2549, and 6214 compliant. The NIST is facing further controversy following claims that it intentionally 'backdoored' the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. Now an IETF taskforce, after several months of study, has determined that NIST's proposal to increase the security of a venerable UNIX encryption algorithm by 'doubling the cycle length' actually makes the algorithm more susceptible to cryptanalysis. Cryptographers are recommending that all programs that use the new algorithm immediately revert to the old 'ROT13' standard. Quote of the Week: "In conclusion, the main thing we did wrong when designing ATM security systems in the early to mid-1980s was to worry about criminals being clever; we should rather have worried about our customers - the banks' system designers, implementers, and testers - being stupid." Ross Anderson, "Security Engineering" SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia was arrested yesterday and charged with threatening to assassinate POTUS Barak Obama. Justice Scalia was released 6 hours later after scientific vocal analysis of his Skype call to Justice Samuel Alito revealed that his actual statement was, "Let's kill the precedent". The FBI blamed the British GCHQ for providing them a poor quality recording, to which a GCHQ spokesperson replied that the recording was "exactly what the NSA gave us". The Microsoft Corporation denied it provided any Skype information to the NSA whatsoever via a press representative whose trousers were quickly extinguished by an attentive aide. Tonight on NSA TV - "Sexting with the Stars" Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga in hot girl-on-girl action! (security clearance 'Secret' or above required)

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cypherpunks buy the farm
by coderman 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

regarding various altcoin pools for various eventualities: consider a cypherpunk insurance pool with coins allocated fractionally by some agreed upon method or individual contribution. in the event of their untimely demise for any reason, said funds delivered to designated entity named by prior cryptographic signature (which must be frequently re-attested). would it be useful to have a pool for cypherpunks who "buy the farm"? expenses per "buy the farm" may be as trivial as re-homing your cat and books, or as extensive as a large family with medical complications, significant debt obligations, and unexpected costly events of unplanned nature requiring support decades into the future. <span id="VOTE" action="makeitso" class="broken"> --- the only restriction which may be advisable is prohibiting the designated beneficiary from running a death pool against specific or general groups of individuals. my distributed graph solver still crunching, but preliminary results suggest that a critical threshold of cypherpunks with wills to death pools combined with a specific trigger set of few otherwise natural deaths multiplies into a maelstrom of murder; presuming of course that a reasonably robust death prediction market or assassination market comes into existence which satisfies the pre-conditions of my computational game theory model of this multi-party, multi-round stratagem mapped over a topological isomorphism of the entire set of probabilities for a given set of initial conditions into a single high order topological manifold transformation collected in aggregate for an overall motif of risk... will advise. best regards,

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Dying Grandma's Coded Messages.
by Jim Bell 22 Jan '14

22 Jan '14

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/the-internet-helps-decode-grandmother-… http://ask.metafilter.com/255675/Decoding-cancer-addled-ramblings Jim Bell

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Been there, done that.
by Jim Bell 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

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Feinstein: NSA Metadata Stays
by grarpamp 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/01/20/1410221/senator-dianne-feinstein-nsa…

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Re: bitcoin
by Bill Stewart 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

My email client is set to sort messages by date but group them by Subject: line. I just happened to notice the following message at the top of a recent conversation: At 02:34 PM 1/26/2009, Eugen Leitl wrote: > Anyone is running it? > Any coins yet? > Anyone having more than 4 connections? I'm not sure the port > forwarding on the firewall worked. So five years later, bitcoins are a thing, and I hope Eugen mined a bunch of them when they were easy. I recently tried installing a Dogecoin wallet and miner on a spare lab machine at work. Dogecoin's a really non-serious Litecoin variant that's mostly not worth anything (something like US$0.0001 - Wow, such coins!), mainly used for tipping authors of Reddit articles about cryptocurrencies, and I figured it would be ok to run it for experimentation because its near-zero value doesn't count as "using work resources to make money" (Wow! Much electrons!) I've found a couple of interesting things running it. - Litecoin uses scrypt, which was designed to not fit into ASICs or GPUs, so people with regular PCs could still mine it, without being crowded out by commercial miners. It turns out that people have figured out how to fit it into GPUs, which still run about 10-100 times as fast as CPU mining, so if I wanted to actually make money mining $25 Litecoins I should buy a $100 graphics card; it's not worth it for Dogecoins. (Woof!) - The spare desktop lab machine has Intel 965 motherboard graphics GPU; there don't seem to be any miners for it, unlike the AMD and nVidia GPUs, so it's only running CPU mining. Ok for Doge chow - much coins! - While running background CPU-burning number-crunchers on a laptop is probably just as bad an idea today as it was when I was crunching Mersenne primes in the 90s, because of heat and battery problems, I haven't been able to verify whether that's still true today. My work laptop has an nVidia GPU, but not one of the high-end ones, and an 8-core i7 CPU, and McAfee Anti-Virus seems to think the mining programs are malware, so I haven't been able to test either one with binaries; maybe it'll let me run it if I compile the source myself. - The network security people at work contacted me :-) The firewall thinks Port 22556 is some kind of botnet, and they got hits from my lab machine to random countries around the world. After running anti-virus to make them happy, I checked tcpdump, and Dogewallet-qt uses that port to stay on the net and send and receive money; turning it on and off turns traffic to that port on and off. I'll have to check the source code and verify it, but I'm assuming it's on purpose, rather than a malicious binary distributed by the official Dogecoin site or one I picked up by accident. The miner doesn't have that issue - I'm using it with a mining pool, talking to one server over a fairly standard port. So *coin runs over a distributed service that looks a lot like a botnet. Makes sense, I guess.

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Infiltration / Exfiltration
by Anonymous Remailer (austria) 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

We cypherpunks live by the saying "cypherpunks code". But isn't it time for more than just coding? We're in a very real digital war for the freedom of the Internet, similar to what we faced in the 1990's but with even more at stake and a better funded, better equipped enemy. Isn't it time for infiltration? The cypherpunk community has some of the best tech people (not just programmers) out there. We could easily get jobs within government agencies and then help exfiltrate data out of them into the hands of the public of civil rights agencies like the ACLU in America. I understand how distasteful working in the belly of the beast might be but isn't it one of the most needed things cyperpunks can do right now?

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Re: "the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present"
by Bill Stewart 21 Jan '14

21 Jan '14

At 09:14 AM 1/19/2014, coderman wrote: >(2) threats to the United States and its interests from terrorism; Terrorism was the previous justification for the bulk collection and for the 3-degrees-of-separation "rule", so no change. >(3) threats to the United States and its interests from the >development, possession, proliferation, or use of weapons of mass >destruction; When Dubya Bush was trying to justify invading Iraq, he talked about WMDs as "nuculur bombs" and chemical and biological weapons. But when some angry young zealot tried to car-bomb Times Square using "explosives" he'd gotten from an FBI informant, they also charged him with making "weapons of mass destruction", the Boston Marathon bombers got charged with that, and I think even pipe bombs have been called WMDs recently. So WMDs might be any random young resident calling his brother or cousin, and the NSA still gets to Tap All The Phones. >(4) cybersecurity threats; [ED: WTF???] Hey, the guy might be using Skype to call his cousin instead of minutes. And people are constantly trying to hack the computers at military facilities, banks, and civilian government agencies, either with deliberate targeting or just because it's easier not to program your botnet to use whitelists, and maybe that defense contractor's supercomputer can mine Litecoins fast. So no, I don't see the situation improving soon, and certainly not before they repeal Moore's Law.

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