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Re: [tor-talk] KARMA POLICE
by Zenaan Harkness 01 Oct '15

01 Oct '15

On 10/1/15, Ryan Carboni <ryacko(a)gmail.com> wrote: > http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/exclusive-in-2009-ed-snowden-sai… > > https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-o… > > Yep. > > Time to create a massive donation drive for Tor. I applaud and share your enthusiasm and intention. But. The assumption that "enough money will solve the problem" is generally false. What is needed is a supra-tor or supra-"supplied by the govt/ isp" physical network layer - or at least enough nodes in a 'slightly new design' network which can use those nodes (assuming there are enough of them, which might be large number, I have no idea). That means individuals setting up their own links between them and their neighbors. Neighbors is a loose concept - wireless links can hop a fair distance. The principle is: - if you don't control it, if you did not physically set it up, it monitors you; - if you don't install and 'control' the software running on the hardware, it monitors you; - if your hardware is backdoored before you receive it (e.g. built in hidden other-than-wifi radio, keylogging cpu microcode, full hidden net sniffing computer in your ethernet port), notwithstanding the software you install on it, it monitors you. There is so much room for necessary improvement that the situation is depressingly grim. TBB/Tor is at least something - just be sure you understand what it is, and what it is not. Good luck and surf safe, Zenaan

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CloudFlare Keyless SSL WAS Re: Snowden on the Twitters
by Travis Biehn 01 Oct '15

01 Oct '15

An oldie, somewhat OT. I enjoyed CF's bit of engineering here - of course CF is still a point where they are working with injectable plaintext. At least they don't have your private key material. https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-ssl-the-nitty-gritty-technical-details/ What would be solid is if there were a browser module that did several things: Eliminated JavaScript dynamic calls (eval, new function(), setTimeout, setInterval, so on.) Eliminate 3rd party assets. Allowed web assets to be signed. Allowed sets of web assets to be versioned (and attested to by 3rd parties.) Dynamic HTML and JS (read, non-static HTML & JS) would not be supported. The combination of signing, versioning and lack of dynamic features paves the way for uninjectable, client-side in browser encryption/decryption. Something AFAIK we cannot do today. Is anyone working on it? -Travis On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 11:23 AM, Georgi Guninski <guninski(a)guninski.com> wrote: > On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 01:26:18AM -0400, grarpamp wrote: > > https://twitter.com/Snowden > > How this scores on twatter: > > 1.03 meeelion followers for about 23 hours on twatter? > (not sure about the error terms). > > -- Twitter <https://twitter.com/tbiehn> | LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/travisbiehn> | GitHub <http://github.com/tbiehn> | TravisBiehn.com <http://www.travisbiehn.com> | Google Plus <https://plus.google.com/+TravisBiehn>

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US Pres Candidate Carly Fiorina Supplies NSA, Spying, Torture, Warmongering and Bankruptcy
by grarpamp 30 Sep '15

30 Sep '15

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/carly-fiorina-i-supplied-hp-servers-for-ns… https://www.yahoo.com/politics/carly-fiorina-defends-bush-era-torture-and-s… http://politics.slashdot.org/story/15/09/29/220239/carly-fiorina-i-supplied… According to an article at Motherboard, shortly after 9/11, NSA director Michael Hayden requested extra computing power and Carly Fiorina, then CEO of HP, responded by re-routing truckloads of servers to the agency. Fiorina acknowledged providing the servers to the NSA during an interview with Michael Isikoff in which she defended warrantless surveillance (as well as waterboarding) and framed her collaboration with the NSA in patriotic terms. Fiorina's compliance with Hayden's request for HP servers is but one episode in a long-running and close relationship between the GOP presidential hopeful and U.S. intelligence agencies. $500 billion over ten years by one estimate—and an upgrade of “every leg of the nuclear triad,”

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Windows TrueCrypt Fatally Flawed
by Brenda Fernández 30 Sep '15

30 Sep '15

Windows TrueCrypt Fatally Flawed Posted on September 30, 2015 <http://qntra.net/2015/09/windows-truecrypt-fatally-flawed/> by Bingo Boingo <http://qntra.net/author/bingoboingo/> Continued research after the first TrueCrypt audit yielded inconclusive results has discovered fatal privilege escalation vulnerabilities allowing for complete takeover <http://www.itworld.com/article/2987438/newly-found-truecrypt-flaw-allows-fu…> (archived <https://archive.is/tJSlv>). So far this is known to affect TrueCrypt on Windows boxes <http://qntra.net/2015/08/windows-10-banned-from-numerous-torrent-trackers/>, but there is still potential for other flaws to be discovered in TrueCrypt on other platforms. Details of the vulnerabilities are not yet disclosed, but this supports the possibility that it may not be possible at all to develop software offering any level of security on the Windows platform. This entry was posted in News <http://qntra.net/category/news/>, Software <http://qntra.net/category/software/>. Bookmark the permalink <http://qntra.net/2015/09/windows-truecrypt-fatally-flawed/>. One thought on “Windows TrueCrypt Fatally Flawed” 1. Bingo Boingo says: September 30, 2015 at 12:44 am <http://qntra.net/2015/09/windows-truecrypt-fatally-flawed/#comment-62417> Further: The VeraCrypt derivative forked from TrueCrypt though this particular issue was reportedly patched, likely continues to posses undiscovered security issues. -- Brenda Fernández me(a)brendafernandez.com GPG: CE5BEE6C81FCA4D4 <http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xCE5BEE6C81FCA4D4>

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And here it is - In UN Speech Putin Blasts US Foreign Policy
by Zenaan Harkness 29 Sep '15

29 Sep '15

In UN Speech Putin Blasts US Foreign Policy http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/un-speech-putin-blasts-us-foreign-pol… (includes full official transcript) And, as the image tells, Obama not happy: http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/multinational-deal-may-allow-assad-st… "Multinational Deal May Allow Assad to Stay" (Many quotes I am tempted to quote, but better is enjoy the fullness of this blessing in action. The world be grateful. Z)

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What CBS Edited out of Putin's Interview [on "60 Minutes"]
by Zenaan Harkness 29 Sep '15

29 Sep '15

So, what was edited from Putin's rare "60 Minutes" interview on CBS? Those bits embarrassing to USA government it seems - who would have thought ... Enjoy, Zenaan "What CBS Edited out of Putin's Interview" http://russia-insider.com/en/media-criticism/what-cbs-edited-out-putins-int… A full transcript and a youtube link is here: "UPDATED: "We know everything" - Putin's interview on American CBS PLUS what was cut from the interview" http://fortruss.blogspot.si/2015/09/putins-interview-on-american-60-minutes…

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Fwd: EPA opposed DMCA exemptions that could have revealed Volkswagen fraud
by Zenaan Harkness 29 Sep '15

29 Sep '15

Not new but on topic at the moment - DMCA is about control of end consumers/ users, not about copyright (or rather, it's abuse of copyright). ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Free Software Foundation <info(a)fsf.org> Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2015 19:40:48 -0400 Subject: EPA opposed DMCA exemptions that could have revealed Volkswagen fraud Dear Mr Harkness, We have written previously about the [organizations and individuals][1] who opposed exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions. These drones oppose the rights of users to backup, modify, and study the software and devices that we own. The DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions create legal penalties for simply accessing your software under your own terms, and raises those penalties even higher should dare to share the tools needed to do so. It creates real penalties for anyone who wants to avoid Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) controls. The granting of exemptions to these totalitarian rules is a broken and half-hearted attempt to limit the damage these rules bring, granting for 3 years a reprieve for certain specified devices and software. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) side-stepped this process and [sent a letter][2] separately directly to the Copyright Office. In the letter they argued that users should not be able to access and modify the software on their own vehicles. In their estimation, this would enable users to violate emissions controls. So it would be better for them if the hammer of the DMCA remained hanging over the head of every user or researcher who wanted to access the software on their vehicle. Of course, just a few months after telling the Copyright Office that users couldn't be trusted with access to their devices, the EPA revealed a major scandal involving Volkswagen. It turns out that Volkswagen had for many years cheated the emissions test performed by the EPA. Volkswagen had surreptitiously included some code in their diesel vehicles that would detect the EPA's tests and have the car change its performance in order to meet EPA mandates. Once the test was over, the code would revert the vehicle to its normal, high-polluting functioning. This scam apparently went on for years before it was detected by researchers. Of course the irony is that if users and researchers had the right to access the software on their cars, they might have discovered this fraud years ago. As Eben Moglen, founder of the [Software Freedom Law Center][3] [noted][4] "If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.” Volkswagen is already a contributor on the kernel Linux, and as Bradley M. Kuhn, President and Distinguished Technologist of the [Software Freedom Conservancy][5] pointed out it is likely that Volkswagen vehicles already contain some free software. But some is not all, and clearly they kept much of their software secret in order to hide their scam. If all the software on the vehicles was free software they never could have perpetrated this scheme. Researchers also could have discovered the fraud had they not been hindered by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, as Kit Walsh of the Electronic Frontier Foundation [argued][6]. The EPA of course failed to understand all this when drafting their letter promoting the use of DRM. But there is a more galling fact at play here. What the EPA argued in their letter was that the exemption should not be granted under the DMCA as a means for enforcing efficiency standards. That clearly isn't the stated purpose of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and highlights one of the fundamental problems with DRM. That a government agency would try to commandeer the DRM of private actors, not to enforce copyright but as a means to enforce something wholly unrelated, demonstrates a central truth: DRM is not about copyright; it's about control. It's about dominating users. It's about spying on them. It's about installing [rootkits][7] onto their computers. It has nothing to do with rights, and everything to do with restriction. We can't let governments and corporation use DRM to take over our lives. This is what you can do today to fight back: If you microblog, please share the following message (or your own) with the hashtag #DRMshame. We strongly suggest that if you use [Twitter][8] to publicly call the EPA and Volkswagen out, you do it in a way that avoids using proprietary software: * @EPA You should be ashamed of yourself for trying to use Digital Restrictions Management #DRMshame <https://u.fsf.org/fraud> * @VW All software on your vehicles needs to be free software without DRM to restore our trust #DRMshame <https://u.fsf.org/fraud> Here's what else you can do.: * Join the [Defective By Design][9] mailing list to keep up to date on the on-going fight against DRM. * To help fund our work, consider [donating to the FSF][10]. Happy hacking, Donald Robertson Copyright and Licensing Associate [1]: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/meet-the-drm-drones [2]: http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/USCO-letters/EPA_Letter_to_USCO_re_1201.pdf [3]: https://www.softwarefreedom.org/ [4]: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/nyregion/volkswagens-diesel-fraud-makes-c… [5]: https://sfconservancy.org/ [6]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/researchers-could-have-uncovered-volk… [7]: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/sony [8]: https://www.fsf.org/twitter [9]: https://defectivebydesign.org/join [10]: https://donate.fsf.org -- * Follow us at <https://status.fsf.org/fsf>. * Subscribe to our RSS feeds at <https://fsf.org/blogs/RSS>. * Join us as an associate member at <https://www.fsf.org/jf>. Sent from the Free Software Foundation, 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor Boston, Massachusetts 02110-1335 United States

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NATO, the finger of death
by Zenaan Harkness 29 Sep '15

29 Sep '15

The english of this author in the following opinion piece is a little broken here and there sorry. --- http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/28-08-2014/128397-nato_demonic-… NATO, the finger of death 28.08.2014 Iraq: Chaos! Libya: Chaos! Syria: Chaos! Whatever NATO touches, turns putrid, rots and dies. Three interventions by the Anglo-Saxon Alliance (UK and US), two by the FUKUS Axis (add France), three interventions by NATO, three destabilized States crawling with terrorists. The responsibility lies at the feet of Washington and its poodle States and the onus is on them to right the wrongs they willfully committed. You messed up, now... Pay for it! Are dogs Vegans? Do you feed goldfish chocolate? Common sense says no in both cases. Common sense also dictates that you do not intervene in highly complex societies with thousands of years of tradition and lore intricately mixed up in a myriad of ethnic and religious mosaics cemented together by a Governing body that understands where the point of equilibrium is to be found and which is kept in its position by the players in the society which it governs. Tweet Print version + - Font Size Send to friend A company of the Portuguese Army was detailed to build a new village for a community in the interior of Angola during the Colonial War*. The company had been instructed to do so because the village had been devastated. The architect based his idea on the downtown area of the capital city of Portugal, Lisbon, reconstructed in straight parallel lines after the earthquake and ensuing tsunami in 1755, which destroyed the city. The community was transported to the village and proudly shown their new home by the Portuguese captain. They ran away. Asked why they didn't like their village, the community leader, or soba, explained: "Our village is based on the circle. We eat sitting in a circle, our homes are circular, we sit outside in a circle in the evenings telling stories, laughing and singing. We take decisions sitting in a circle, it has no head, no beginning and no end. And no dark corners." Can women in Saudi Arabia use forks when they eat? No, because it is considered improper for a woman to put four long and hard prongs in her mouth at the same time because when a man sees this, it gives him unclean thoughts. For those western policy-makers chortling in mirth as they read this, let us now come back to the point of this article, the failed Western policy in Iraq, in Libya and in Syria. Iraq: chaos! Libya: chaos! Syria: chaos! In all three cases, Western politicians outdid one another in sheer arrogance, claiming (so democratically) that "Saddam must go", "Gaddafy must go," and "Assad must go". What we see in these three countries today is the direct result of the criminal intervention by NATO, its two henchmen, the USA and its poodle in chief, the UK and recently, France, which spends its time subserviently crawling around the legs of its Anglo-Saxon NATO masters across the Channel and across the Ocean, when it isn't obediently obeying Germany's calls for austerity. NATO destroyed Iraq, destroyed the State, destroyed the mechanisms of control in a highly complex society whose many ethnic and religious groups co-existed in peace until the West stepped in, after provoking Iraq by getting Kuwait to steal oil in cross-drilling operations, then demonizing the Iraqi Government, then directly interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign State by getting the Shiites in the South to rebel, before the uprising was crushed. This criminally irresponsible approach to foreign policy-making seems to be endemic in the corridors of Whitehall, London and Washington DC, one of Whitehall's most fetid and dysfunctional abortions over the years. There ensued a decade of terrorist activity in Iraq between the First and Second Gulf Wars, in which NATO aircraft strafed fields of cereals and left the country strewn with Depleted Uranium, causing the deaths and malformations of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, before the outrage in 2003 when the Government was overthrown in an illegal military invasion which resulted in around one million deaths (murders) and today, the total destabilization of the State by ISIL, a wonderful feather in the cap for Washington and its poodle in chief. Yesterday they were full of bravado as they marched across the border knowing Saddam Hussein (who was keeping al-Qaeda out of Iraq) had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (his mistake was not to arm himself to the hilt) and knowing the Iraqi Armed Forces would not fight back (in the event the invasion was staged, with salvoes being fired over the Iraqi's heads as they retreated to negotiated positions). Today Washington and London are quivering in fear and are too scared to fight ISIL, the monster they created. This same criminal irresponsibility was demonstrated in Libya, where they again intervened, this time joined by that sickening wannabe Napoleon, France, this time not only creating but actively using terrorists on their own lists of proscribed groups, which Muammar al-Gaddafy (the first international leader to issue arrest warrants against al-Qaeda) was fighting. Again, military equipment was deployed against civilian structures, civilians were slaughtered by NATO aircraft, the Libyan water supply system was targeted (war crime), the electricity grid was destroyed (war crime) and the result, once again, was the wholesale destruction of a State. Under the Geneva Conventions, any military intervention must leave the area invaded functioning properly attending to the needs of its citizens. In not managing to guarantee this, the USA and its poodles in Europe have failed miserably in their task and have shirked their responsibilities. They are also responsible for criminal acts breaching every fiber of international law. Their leaders are, in plain English, war criminals and murderers. And now for Syria. Just a few months ago that Nobel Peace Prizewinner Obama in the USA was saying that Assad had to go, obediently parroted by Cameron and Mr. 17 per cent popularity ratings, Hollande. Now, they are considering sending military support to fight off ISIL in Syria, after these very same Western/NATO powers armed, trained and aided terrorists to fight the Government of President Assad, which has wide approval across Syrian society. If it was not so serious, it would be hilarious. But destroying countries and societies has shocking social implications. What these NATO countries deserve is for their boomerang to come back and smack them square in the face, facing their own jihadis, to get a taste of their own medicine, except for the fact that logic dictates that one cannot attack their approach abroad and then wish the same thing on them at home. What these criminally irresponsible powers must do is man up, accept the responsibility for what they have done, and pay to sort out the problems they created, keeping their unwanted troops at home. As those in Whitehall and Washington (let's be honest, Paris really doesn't count, does it?) claim that we live in difficult times and attack those who disagree with their criminal modus operandi, they should be reminded that the evils they face are those of their own creation. Instead of arrogantly ploughing ahead like modern-day imperialists, they would do better to respect international law for once, accept the responsibility for their actions, mind their own business and start behaving with goodwill, instead of malevolence. For those who have been involved in the political and military processes in Iraq, Libya and Syria, they belong behind bars. The mechanisms are already in place, the wheel is turning slowly, and most of them will live long enough to cast looks of fear over their shoulders wherever they may go. Blair already does, Rumsfeld dare not step off an aircraft outside the USA, ditto Powell, Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice. The head of NATO is evil, psychopathic; the hand of NATO is putrid, sociopathic and the finger of NATO is as icy as it is satanic and demonic. It is the finger of death, contaminating everything it touches. NATO is the incarnation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine and Death. It is the Empire of Evil. *The Colonial War was fought between Portugal and factions in its former colonies Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, from 1961 to 1974; there was no war in Portugal's other African provinces, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe Isles. Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey Pravda.Ru

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Rogue States and Diplomacy: a Conversation With Noam Chomsky
by Zenaan Harkness 28 Sep '15

28 Sep '15

Rogue States and Diplomacy: a Conversation With Noam Chomsky http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/17/rogue-states-and-diplomacy-a-convers… The interview is quite long, focusing on the USA Republican reaction to the Iran sanction-lifting deal, amongst other things. Noam seems to be a Professor, so I guess his arguments might be too intellectual for the unwashed masses. Here is one question and answer: Professor Chomsky, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, has said that the problem is the “instability that Iran fuels beyond its nuclear programme”. She echoed U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter, who went to Israel’s northern border and said, “We will continue to help Israel counter Iran’s malign influence” by supporting Hizbollah. The U.S., he intimated, reserved the right to use military force against Iran. Could you comment on this? NC: Power’s usage is standard: she defines “stabilisation” according to a peculiar logic. For instance, U.S. policy in Iraq is defined as stabilisation. What does that stabilisation look like? The U.S. invades a country, with hundreds of thousands killed and millions becoming refugees, along with barbarous torture and destruction that Iraqis compare to the Mongol invasions, leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. It also ignited sectarian conflict that is tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] monstrosity along with its Saudi ally. That is stabilisation. The standard usage sometimes reaches levels that are almost surreal, as when liberal commentator James Chace, former editor of Foreign Affairs, explains that the U.S. sought to “destabilise a freely elected Marxist government in Chile” because “we were determined to seek stability” [under the Pinochet dictatorship]. Let us consider the case of Hizbollah and Hamas. Both emerged in resistance to U.S.-backed Israeli violence and aggression, which vastly exceeds anything attributed to these organisations. Whatever one thinks about them, or other beneficiaries of Iranian support, Iran hardly ranks high in support for terror worldwide, even within the Muslim world. Among Islamic states, Saudi Arabia is far in the lead as a sponsor of Islamic terror, not only by direct funding by wealthy Saudis and others in the Gulf but even more by the missionary zeal with which the Saudis promulgate their extremist Wahhabi-Salafi version of Islam through Quranic schools, mosques, clerics, and other means available to a religious dictatorship with enormous oil wealth. The ISIS is an extremist offshoot of Saudi religious extremism and its fanning of jehadi flames. In generation of Islamic terror, however, nothing can compare with the U.S. “war on terror”, which has helped to spread the plague from a small tribal area in Afghanistan-Pakistan to a vast region from West Africa to South-East Asia. The invasion of Iraq alone escalated terror attacks by a factor of seven in the first year, well beyond even what had been predicted by intelligence agencies. Drone warfare against marginalised and oppressed tribal societies also elicits demands for revenge, as ample evidence indicates. The two Iranian clients [Hizbollah and Hamas] also share the crime of winning the popular vote in the only free elections held in the Arab world. Hizbollah is guilty of the even more heinous crime of compelling Israel to withdraw from its occupation of southern Lebanon in violation of [U.N.] Security Council orders dating back decades, an illegal regime of terror punctuated with episodes of extreme violence, murder and destruction. Iran’s “fuelling instability” is particularly dramatic in Iraq, where, among other crimes, it alone came at once to the aid of Kurds defending themselves from the ISIS invasion and it is building a $2.5 billion power plant to try to bring electrical power back to the level before the U.S. invasion.

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Fw: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market.
by jim bell 27 Sep '15

27 Sep '15

Copied from correspondence. ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: Jim Epstein <jimepstein(a)gmail.com> To: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2015 5:23 AM Subject: Re: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. Thanks, jim. I will read your essay and engage with this topic again soon, but I'm immersed in another unrelated story that's consuming my brain and time. I'll get back to you. On Sat, Sep 26, 2015 at 3:47 AM jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I wanted to mention that Prof Juels has responded to my inquiry. See his work at: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uac… I should point out that the main reason for my inquiry WASN'T to get academic credit, but rather to point out that people who have read my AP essay (and who understand and agree with its goals and likelihood of working) would consider Juels et al objectives to be undesirable and, indeed, dangerous. Superficially, it sounds good to say that they are trying to prevent "criminal contracts", but for those of us who oppose (for example) laws against currently-illegal drugs, we might very well WANT a "criminal contract" to be operational, like Silk Road or such. Or my AP (assassination politics) idea. Prof Juels claims that he/they were not aware of my AP essay. Well, sorry, but I find that a little hard to believe. It's not that it's hard to believe that an average citizen of America (or the world) hadn't heard of it.THAT would be easy to believe. Rather, Juels, Shi, and Kosba claim to be working on the concept of trying to stop "criminal contracts", and do you really believe they haven't heard of AP?!? My understanding is that my AP essay is probably the second most-famous Internet essay in existence, perhaps being Ted Kaczynski's, and it makes far more sense. Now that Juels, Shi, and Kosba definitely know about AP, I think that they should address its implications BEFORE they purport to fight it. Jim Bell From: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> To: Jim Epstein <jimepstein(a)gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 3:39 PM Subject: Re: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. You might also want to look at http://www.arijuels.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/public_gyges.pdf , by Juels, Shi, and Kosba. Jim Bell From: Jim Epstein <jimepstein(a)gmail.com> To: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 2:35 PM Subject: Re: Fw: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. I'm not familiar with it, but I'm going to read it. I'm very interested. Thanks for sending this. Jim On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:14 PM, jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Dear Mr. Epstein, Are you familiar with my 1995-6 essay, "Assassination Politics". www://cryptome.org/ap.htm Jim Bell ----- Forwarded Message ----- From: jim bell <jdb10987(a)yahoo.com> To: Cpunks List <cypherpunks(a)cpunks.org> Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 7:31 PM Subject: Augur: Blockchain-based Internet prediction market. http://reason.com/blog/2015/08/11/augur-gambling-prediction-ethereum Augur May Become the Greatest Gambling Platform in History. Is There Anything the Government Can Do to Stop It? A blockchain-based prediction market that won’t be controlled or managed by anyone. Jim Epstein Aug. 11, 2015 12:36 pm An online gambling platform could do to the neighborhood bookie what electric refrigerators did to the ice delivery man. Coming this fall, Augur will allow participants to wager money on any future event of their choosing. Software will set the odds, collect the bets, and disperse the winnings. The price alone should give Nevada sportsbook operators pause; an estimated one percent of every pot will go to keep the system running. The average vig today is about 10 times that. Augur isn't a full-fledged casino. You can't play roulette or poker, and running lotto on the platform would be tricky. But it'll be great for sports betting. Here’s what’s truly novel about Augur: It won’t be controlled by any person or entity, nor will it operate off of any one computer network. All the money in the system will be in Bitcoin, or other types of peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, so no credit card companies or banks need to be involved. If the system runs afoul of regulators—and if it’s successful, it most certainly will—they'll find that there's no company to sue, no computer hardware to pull out of the wall, and no CEO to lockup in a cage.This is new legal territory. If Augur catches on as a tool for betting on everything from basketball games to stock prices, is there anything the government can do to stop it? Augur is a decentralized peer-to-peer marketplace, a new kind of entity made possible by recent breakthroughs in computer science. The purpose of these platforms is to facilitate the exchange of goods and services among perfect strangers on a platform that nobody administers or controls. Augur’s software will run on what’s known as a “blockchain"—a concept introduced in 2008 with the invention of Bitcoin—that's essentially a shared database for executing trades that's powered and maintained by its users. Bitcoin’s blockchain was designed as a banking ledger of sorts—kind of like a distributed Microsoft Excel file—but Augur will utilize a groundbreaking new project called Ethereum that expands on this concept. Ethereum allows Augur's entire system to live on the blockchain. That means the software and processing power that makes Augur function will be distributed among hundreds or thousands of computers. Destroying Augur would involve unplugging the computers of everyone in the world participating in the Ethereum blockchain. If Augur is destined to become the cypherpunks answer to gambling prohibition—the betting man’s version of the online drug market Silk Road if you will—you'd never know it from talking with its developers. They work for a San Francisco-based nonprofit, attend conferences, have legal representation, and talk openly about what they’re up to with reporters. Augur even commissionedone of those cheesy motion graphics promotional videos favored by new tech startups. About half of the roughly $600,000 raised by Augur's development team comes from Joe Costello, the successful tech entrepreneur who was once Steve Jobs' top pick to become the CEO of Apple. Joey Krug, a twenty-year-old Pomona college dropout and Augur's lead developer, never uses the world “gambling" to describe his venture. He and his team of five employees call Augur a “prediction market,” a term that emphasizes the information generated when a bunch of people have a financial incentive to feed their expertise into a sophisticated algorithm. With Augur, as bettors move money in and out of the pot, the odds adjust. This yields publicly available statistics that should carry weight because they're derived from the opinions of a crowd of people with a stake in the results. InTrade, for example, the best-known prediction market until federal regulators forced it to stop serving U.S. customers in 2012, beat the pollsters and pundits by foreseeing the outcome of the 2008 presidential elections in 48 out of 50 states. Augur’s developers hope that their platform will make it possible to do a Google search to look up the likelihood of some future event. This could usher in a better world, with more informed policy decisions and less malinvestment. But Augur also serves the less high-minded—though no less noble—purpose of providing cost savings and convenience to gamblers. Restrictions on gambling serve to protect government revenue at the betting man's expense. State-sanctioned casino operators pay high taxes, and state-run lotteries fleece their customers. But there's no logical or moral case for government restrictions on gambling, since no third party is harmed when consenting adults wager money on the future. Augur actually has the potential to make the world safer by taking away market share in the gambling industry from criminals. And yet sports betting is illegal in most states, and prediction markets are tightly regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CTFC). The agency sued Ireland-based InTrade in 2012 to prevent it from accepting bets from U.S. customers. (The company folded shortly after.) In 2013, the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) jointly sued the prediction market Banc de Binary for allowing U.S. customers to make bets on commodity prices. The CFTC has approved other prediction markets, such as the New Zealand-based PredictIt, but only after it agreed to abide by the agency's restrictions. Krug says the Augur team is planning to meet with CFTC staff go over how their system works before it’s launched, but says he's not overly concerned. “Our friends in Washington, D.C. say the CFTC will probably just dismiss Augur and say it’s not a big deal,” Krug told me in a phone interview. That doesn’t sound like much of a legal strategy, but how do you have a legal strategy when you're building something unlike anything that's ever existed? Federal anti-gambling laws, such as the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, target the companies that facilitate online betting— website operators, credit card companies, banks—not individual gamblers. Augur’s biggest legal vulnerability is the community of human “reporters” who are needed to settle bets on the platform, says Cardozo Law School's Aaron Wright, who is writing a book about the legal implications of blockchain technology. Let’s say a group of people wager money on Augur over the outcome of a boxing match. Once the bout is over, human participants (who receive a portion of the trading fees as compensation) must report the outcome to the system before Augur’s software will disperse the money to the winners. "There’s at least an argument that the people doing that reporting are aiding or abetting unlicensed options and could be prosecuted," says Wright. But Augur doesn't collect personal information on any of its users, so identifying these people could be difficult. And Augur is a borderless technology, so U.S. gamblers could simply rely on foreigners to report on the outcomes of their bets. One attorney I spoke with suggested that the team that’s building Augur could be brought up on charges for aiding and abetting a criminal conspiracy. Nate Cardozo, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, thinks that's far-fetched but says he can't rule it out. Cardozo emphasizes that writing open source software doesn’t necessarily protect the team from prosecution. “We’ve taken the steps that we need to take in order to bracket the individual's risk and the organization’s risk,” says Augur’s attorney, Marco Santori, who declined to comment further on exactly what those steps might entail. Even if Krug and his colleagues were to face criminal prosecution, the technology would live on. After Augur is born into the world, the development team could release a software update that would cripple the system. But in that case, Augur's users could band together to block any changes to the underlying code, or another developer could copy the open source code and simply re-launch the platform. The big question with Augur—and with blockchain platforms more generally—is whether they can outrun our regulatory state long enough to grow so large and popular that they're truly unstoppable. My money’s on Augur in that race. For more on the promises and pitfalls of decentralized peer-to-peer marketplaces, read my recentReason magazine feature story on the topic.

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