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Mexican Mass Disappearance (Iguala 2014) Investigators Targeted by NSO (Israeli) Spyware
by Razer 10 Jul '17

10 Jul '17

McClatchy: > > Investigators say targets of high-tech spying in Mexico included an > international group of experts sent to the country by the > Inter-American Human Rights Commission. > > The spyware previously was directed at journalists, activists and > opposition politicians in Mexico. But targeting foreign experts > operating under the aegis of an international body marks an escalation > of the scandal. > > A report released Monday by the internet watchdog group Citizen Lab > found that someone sent emails with links to the spyware to the > International Group of Independent Experts. Those experts had been > critical of the government's investigation into the 2014 disappearance > of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Guerrero state. > > The Israeli-made spyware is sold exclusively to governments. The > Mexican government bought it, but it's not clear who used it. > > http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/artic… Details @CitizenLab: https://citizenlab.org/2017/07/mexico-disappearances-nso/

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Binney and Brown WBAI Interview
by Razer 10 Jul '17

10 Jul '17

> Randy Credico speaks with Senior CIA Analyst William Binney and NYC > Journalist, Hactivist Barrett Brown on a Live on the Fly July 4th Special. https://www.wbai.org/articles.php?article=3470

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SWEDEN YES !!!
by You Fags 10 Jul '17

10 Jul '17

> Shawn K. Quinn skquinn at rushpost.com > Sat Jul 8 22:58:25 PDT 2017 > > This is a hoax. > And the earth is a spinning sphere flying through space. > a reliable source > also known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages Sweden is fuggidy fugged (pics & links related). Sweden to hold 'man-free' music festival: web.archive.org/web/bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40504452 Sweden to back NHS-funded womb transplants for biological males who identify as women: web.archive.org/web/europeancivilwar.com/sweden-breaks-overton-window-tange… Sweden: The number of lawless areas ("no-go zones") now totals 61: web.archive.org/web/10news.one/sweden-on-the-brink-of-civil-war-national-po… > sno pes source: > Erik Jansåker, a police chief in Malmö, told us that the > term "no-go zone" never appeared in the report itself."" > never appeared in the report > in the report > > citing traitors as source of truth > Sno pes has been debunked as biased and untrustworthy, faggot. But we all know we cannot expect truth or reason from you, pwnstar anon.

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SWEDEN YES !!!
by You Fags 10 Jul '17

10 Jul '17

> Cecilia Tanaka cecilia.tanaka at gmail.com > Sun Jul 9 02:24:12 PDT 2017 > > shits on zulu cuz "muh feels" > c&c anon, as someone living in the beautiful country of Formerly-known-as-brazil, you must have been to favela. Or are these a hoax, too ?

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Encrypted Media Extensions will save the web
by drm 09 Jul '17

09 Jul '17

arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/drm-in-html5-is-a-victory-for-the-open-web… DRM in HTML5 is a victory for the open Web, not a defeat W3C's decision to publish a DRM framework will keep the Web relevant and useful. Peter Bright - Mar 6, 2017 9:29 pm UTC The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the group that orchestrates the development of Web standards, has today published a Working Draft for Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a framework that will allow the delivery of DRM-protected media through the browser without the use of plugins such as Flash or Silverlight. EME does not specify any DRM scheme per se. Rather, it defines a set of APIs that allow JavaScript and HTML to interact with decryption/protection modules. These modules will tend to be platform-specific in one way or another and will contain the core DRM technology. W3C Chief Executive Jeff Jaffe announced W3C's intention yesterday. This was met with a swift response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which tweeted, "Shame on the W3C: today's standards decision paves the way for DRM in the fabric of the open web." The EFF, along with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and various other groups, has campaigned against the development of the EME specification. They signed an open letter voicing their opposition and encouraged others to sign a petition against the spec. The EFF argues that EME runs counter to the philosophy that "the Web needs to be a universal ecosystem that is based on open standards and fully implementable on equal terms by anyone, anywhere, without permission or negotiation." EME undermines the Web's compatibility by allowing sites to demand "specific proprietary third-party software or even special hardware and particular operating systems." Further, the groups argue that the Web is moving away from proprietary, DRM-capable plugins. The EFF writes that "HTML5 was supposed to be better than Flash, and excluding DRM is exactly what would make it better," and the petition claims that "Flash and Silverlight are finally dying off." As a practical matter, it's unlikely that the petition could ever be meaningful. Even if W3C decided to drop EME, there are enough important companies working on the spec—including Netflix, Google, and Microsoft—that a common platform will be built. The only difference is whether it happens under the W3C umbrella or merely as a de facto standard assembled by all the interested parties. Keeping it out of W3C might have been a moral victory, but its practical implications would sit between slim and none. It doesn't matter if browsers implement "W3C EME" or "non-W3C EME" if the technology and its capabilities are identical. These groups are opposed to DRM on principle. The FSF brands systems that support DRM as "defective by design," and insofar as DRM can impede legally protected fair use of media, it has a point. There's a tension between DRM (itself legally protected courtesy of the DMCA) and permissions granted by copyright law. However, it's not clear that EME does anything to exacerbate that situation. The users of EME—companies like Netflix—are today, right now, already streaming DRM-protected media. It's difficult to imagine that any content distributors that are currently distributing unprotected media are going to start using DRM merely because there's a W3C-approved framework for doing so. The EME opponents' claim that Flash and Silverlight are dying off has an element of technical truth, but it's also disingenuous. The technical truth? Silverlight has apparently ceased all development. Flash is still actively developed, with Adobe outlining a ten-year plan for its future development, but the company is also investing heavily in HTML5 tooling and is actively working to ensure that developers have the software to use HTML5 in situations that previously would have used Flash. It's also true that Adobe has discontinued Flash on smartphones. As a result, there's a thriving market of Internet devices that can't use Flash or Silverlight at all. These currently represent only a minority of Internet-connected devices—about 89 percent of browsing is still done on PCs, and an overwhelming majority of them do have Flash installed—but it's a minority that's growing. But the claim is disingenuous when used as an argument against DRM. Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely. Want to send DRM-protected video to an iPhone? "There's an app for that." Native applications on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 can all implement DRM, with some platforms, such as Android and Windows 8, even offering various APIs and features to assist this. In other words, the alternative to using DRM in browser plugins on the Web is not "abandoning DRM;" it's "abandoning the Web." It's hard to see how this is in the Web's best interest. Mozilla, in particular, is fighting this very outcome. The underlying justification for its development of the Firefox OS smartphone platform is that it wants to ensure that the Web itself is the application platform and that software and services aren't locked away in a series of proprietary, platform-specific apps. And yet it's precisely this outcome that opposition to EME will produce. Moreover, a case could be made that EME will make it easier for content distributors to experiment with—and perhaps eventually switch to—DRM-free distribution. Under the current model, whether it be DRM-capable browser plugins or DRM-capable apps, a content distributor such as Netflix has no reason to experiment with unprotected content. Users of the site's services are already using a DRM-capable platform, and they're unlikely to even notice if one or two videos (for example, one of the Netflix-produced broadcasts like House of Cards or the forthcoming Arrested Development episodes) are unprotected. It wouldn't make a difference to them. That wouldn't be the case if Netflix used an HTML5 distribution platform built on top of EME. Some users won't have access to EME, either because their browsers don't support the specification at all, or because their platform doesn't have a suitable DRM module available, or because the DRM modules were explicitly disabled. However, every other aspect of the Netflix Web application could work in these browsers. This kind of Netflix Web app would give Netflix a suitable testing ground for experimenting with unprotected content. This unprotected content would have greater reach and would be accessible to a set of users not normally able to use the protected content. It would provide a testing ground for a company like Netflix to prove that DRM is unnecessary and that by removing DRM, content owners would have greater market access and hence greater potential income. Granted, it might also come with the risk of prolific piracy and unauthorized redistribution, so it might serve only to justify the continued use of DRM. With plugins and apps, there's no meaningful transition to a DRM-free world. There's no good way for distributors to test the waters and see if unprotected distribution is viable. With EME, there is. EME will keep content out of apps and on the Web, and it creates a stepping stone to a DRM-free world. That's not hurting the open Web—it's working to ensure its continued usefulness and relevance.

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Encrypted Media Extensions will kill the web
by drm 09 Jul '17

09 Jul '17

eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-controversy-w3c-greenlights-dr… Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web By Cory Doctorow July 6, 2017 Early today, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body publicly announced its intention to publish Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—a DRM standard for web video—with no safeguards whatsoever for accessibility, security research or competition, despite an unprecedented internal controversy among its staff and members over this issue. EME is a standardized way for web video platforms to control users' browsers, so that we can only watch the videos under rules they set. This kind of technology, commonly called Digital Rights Management (DRM), is backed up by laws like the United States DMCA Section 1201 (most other countries also have laws like this). Today, the W3C announced that it would publish its DRM standard with no protections and no compromises at all. Under these laws, people who bypass DRM to do legal things (like investigate code defects that create dangerous security vulnerabilities) can face civil and criminal penalties. Practically speaking, bypassing DRM isn't hard (Google's version of DRM was broken for six years before anyone noticed), but that doesn't matter. Even low-quality DRM gets the copyright owner the extremely profitable right to stop their customers and competitors from using their products except in the ways that the rightsholder specifies. EFF objects to DRM: it's a bad idea to make technology that treats the owner of a computer as an adversary to be controlled, and DRM wrecks the fairness of the copyright bargain by preventing you from exercising the rights the law gives you when you lawfully acquire a copyrighted work (like the rights to make fair uses like remix or repair, or to resell or lend your copy). But EFF understood that the W3C had members who wanted to make DRM, so we suggested a compromise: a covenant, modeled on the existing W3C member-agreement, that would require members to make a binding promise only to use the law to attack people who infringed copyright, and to leave people alone if they bypassed DRM for legal reasons, like making W3C-standardized video more accessible for people with disabilities. This was a very popular idea. It was endorsed by Unesco, by the Internet Archive, by the creator of the W3C's existing membership agreement, by hundreds of top security researchers, by the competition expert who coined the term "Net Neutrality", and by hundreds of human rights organizations and activists from the global south. The Open Source Initiative amended its definition of "open standard" so that DRM standards could only qualify as a "open" if they protected legitimate activity. Now, it's fair to say that the W3C's DRM advocates didn't like the idea. After a perfunctory discussion process (during which some progress was made), they walked away from the negotiations, and the W3C decided to allow the standardization work to continue despite their unwillingness to compromise. But other W3C members did like the idea. On March 12, the final vote for publishing EME closed, and members ranging from the German National Library to the UK Royal National Institute for Blind People to the cryptocurrency startup Ethereum, to Brave, a new entrant to the browser market -- along with dozens more—rejected the idea of publishing EME without some protections for these equities (the numbers in the vote are confidential by W3C's own membership requirements, but all the members mentioned here have given permission to have their votes revealed.) It was the most controversial vote in W3C history. As weeks and then months stretched out without a decision, another W3C member, the Center for Democracy and Technology, proposed a very, very narrow version of the covenant, one that would only protect security researchers who revealed accidental or deliberate leaks of data marked as private and sensitive by EME. Netflix's representative dismissed the idea out of hand, and then the W3C's CEO effectively killed the proposal. Today, the W3C announced that it would publish its DRM standard with no protections and no compromises at all, stating that W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee had concluded that the objections raised "had already been addressed" or that they were "overruled." In its statement, the W3C said that publishing a DRM standard without protections for core open web activities was better than not doing so, because its DRM had better support for privacy, accessibility, and competition than a non-W3C version of DRM would have. We disagree. Even by the W3C's own measures, EME represents no improvement upon a non-standards approach, and in some important ways, the W3C's DRM is worse than an ad-hoc, industry approach. At root is the way that DRM interacts with the law. Take security: the W3C's specification says that users' computers should be protected from privacy-invading activities by DRM vendors, but without a covenant, it's impossible to check whether this is happening. Recall that Netflix, one of the principal advocates for DRM at W3C, categorically rejected the narrowest of covenants, one that would protect solely the activity of revealing DRM flaws that compromised user privacy. On the question of accessibility, the W3C has simply ignored the substantial formal and informal objections raised by its members, including members with deep expertise in accessibility, such as Vision Australia, Media Access Australia, Benetech, and the RNIB. These organizations pointed out that having a place for assistive data was nice, but to make video accessible, it was necessary to use computers to generate that data. It's great to say that if you know where all the strobe effects are in 10,000,000 hours of videos, you could add warnings to the timelines of those videos to help people with photosensitive epilepsy. But unless you have an unimaginable army of people who can watch all that video, the practical way to find all those strobes is to feed the video to a computer, after bypassing the DRM. Otherwise, most video will never, ever be made safe for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Multiply that by the unimaginable armies of people needed to write subtitles, translate audio, and generate descriptive audio tracks, and you've exceeded the entire human race's video-annotating capacity several times over—but barely scratched the surface of what computers can (and will be able to) do. On the question of competition, the W3C's response is even more frustrating and non-responsive. EME only solves part of the video-transmission standard: for a browser to support EME, it must also license a "Content Decryption Module" (CDM). Without a CDM, video just doesn't work. All the big incumbents advocating for DRM have licenses for CDMs, but new entrants to the market will struggle to get these CDMs, and in order to get them, they have to make promises to restrict otherwise legal activities (for example, CDM licensing terms prevent users in some parts of Europe from seeing videos made available in other parts of the EU). The W3C says that none of this makes DRM any worse than what was there before the standards effort, but they're dead wrong. DRM is covered by a mess of criss-crossing patents that make any kind of interoperable DRM transcendentally hard to create -- unless there's some way of cutting through the patent thicket. That's where the W3C comes in: its patent policy requires members to swear not to enforce their patents against people who implement W3C standards. Since the W3C's membership includes key DRM patent owners, it's the one forum where such a standard can be set. At EFF, we've spent decades defending people engaged in legitimate activities that companies or governments disliked: researchers who go public with defects in products whose users are blithely unaware of them; new entrants to monopolized markets who offer better products with features the cozy old guard don't like; public spirited archivists and accessibility workers who want to preserve digital culture and make sure everyone gets to use it. We're dismayed to see the W3C literally overrule the concerns of its public interest members, security experts, accessibility members and innovative startup members, putting the institution's thumb on the scales for the large incumbents that dominate the web, ensuring that dominance lasts forever. This will break people, companies, and projects, and it will be technologists and their lawyers, including the EFF, who will be the ones who'll have to pick up the pieces. We've seen what happens when people and small startups face the wrath of giant corporations whose ire they've aroused. We've seen those people bankrupted, jailed, and personally destroyed. That's why we fought so hard at the W3C, and it's why we're fighting so hard to fix laws like Section 1201 of the DMCA. We've been suing the US government over the constitutionality of DMCA 1201; in the coming months, we'll be back at the US Copyright Office, arguing to maintain and extend the exemptions to 1201 we won in 2015. As for the W3C... we're working on it. There is an appeals process for Tim Berners-Lee's decisions at the W3C, which has never been successfully triggered. The entire project of designing technology to control web users, rather than empowering them, has taken the W3C into uncharted waters, and this is the most unfamiliar of them all. We're looking into this, counting noses, and assessing our options. We'll keep you informed.

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Particl Project
by Cecilia Tanaka 09 Jul '17

09 Jul '17

https://decentralize.today/in-depth-presentation-of-the-part icl-project-b3a41923a07e https://particl.news/particl-foundation-is-approved-6cad0343e04f Only a few excerpts of the text, because it's a long guide: # What is Particl? To sum it up briefly, Particl is a privacy-focused blockchain/P2P hybrid ecosystem that will host a decentralized and anonymous marketplace as well as an array of Dapps using a native cryptocurrency. <SNIP> Particl is the successor of the ShadowProject (https://shadowproject.io/en) a privacy-focused cryptocurrency project started back in August 2014. The team behind this project are known for being innovators in the cryptocurrency scene, being the first to produce many feats such as an HTML5 wallet, a staking mobile wallet with encrypted messaging and transactions, as well as having the first ring signature and HD wallet implementation on BTC codebase. Their Umbra graphical wallet, built using HTML5, is widely known in the “altcoin” community for being absolutely gorgeous and very user-friendly.

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NSA provides list of patents it's willing to share with public
by Ryan Carboni 08 Jul '17

08 Jul '17

Nevermind that the NSA currently is paying telecommunication companies to store our metadata (thanks Snowden!) or that the NSA is subsidizing transoceanic cables (non sarcastic thanks Snowden) https://www.nsa.gov/what-we-do/research/technology-transfer/assets/files/ns… Patent 8,363,825, from 2009, looks at lot like some kind of CRC fuzzy hashing. Patent 9,525,866, from 2016, is anti-camera forensics. Time to go back to film! (or maybe just resize it to 50% and save it as a rather lossy JPEG) Patent 7,406,595, from 2004, shows how the NSA encrypts communications. Sounds more efficient than Enchilada, as submitted to CAESAR. Patent 6,922,774, from 2001, shows what the NSA does with virtual machines. Patent 6,724,893, from 1996, is about key escrow. If one uses TENS, a version of linux from the US government, one notices that the help manual for the encryption wizard talks about key escow. But all our keys is escrowed since the NSA stole SIM card keys from foreign manufacturers of our devices? Patent 6,912,284, from 1983 and the longest expiration date, is about some kind of LFSR AEAD cipher. What? They discovered this in 1983 and we're still working on AEAD ciphers? Patent 6,820,830 appears to be just placing slants under a paper shredder to direct output into multiple rubbish bins. Like people. You can just go to the NSA's website. This is two clicks away from the front page. What are you people doing? If you're going to be lazy.

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In Uruguay’s marijuana experiment, the government is your pot dealer
by Zenaan Harkness 08 Jul '17

08 Jul '17

Anyone know the legal status for Uruguayans who grow a few plants themselves? In Uruguay’s marijuana experiment, the government is your pot dealer https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-uruguays-marijuana-exp…

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Russia bans purchase of foreign non-niche software in Russian state agencies
by Zenaan Harkness 08 Jul '17

08 Jul '17

Import substitution applied to software... http://fortruss.blogspot.ru/2015/11/medvedev-bans-use-of-foreign-made.html Medvedev bans the use of foreign-made software in Russian state agencies Translated by Ollie Richardson for Fort Russ 20th November, 2015 novayagazeta.ru The Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitry Medevdev, has signed a decree prohibiting from 1 January 2016 the purchase of foreign-made software for state needs, reports the press service of the Cabinet. According to the document, customers will now be obliged to buy Russian-produced software. It notes that the initiative is a method of import substitution. The exception is when software has the necessary functional, technical or operational characteristics absent in Russia. To place an order on, for example Microsoft Windows, officials will have to justify the need for this operating system. As reported to "Kommersant" earlier, the official, who asked to remain anonymous, said that a German IT company began to discuss with the Ministry of economic development the possibility of a partial transfer of software production to Russia, in order thus to be able to sell it on government orders. A draft resolution was prepared and submitted by the Ministry of communications and mass communications of the Russian Federation. It was presented to Medvedev earlier in April.

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