- cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Great Barrier Reef apocalypse (93% damaged) is .. fake news
by Zenaan Harkness 21 Mar '17

21 Mar '17

Australia's billion $ a year reef tourism industry, not quite as at risk as previously thought... DELINGPOLE: Great Barrier Reef Still Not Dying, Whatever Washington Post Says… http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/20/delingpole-great-barrier… “We have got to the point where a large fraction of the science we see cannot be relied upon.”

2 1

Join The Revolution of Money
by grarpamp 21 Mar '17

21 Mar '17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLUHT8Ss9rI What better incentive to onboard users than to give away free money :)

1 0

Ritual Magic might "takes out" 'self-driving' cars soon
by Razer 21 Mar '17

21 Mar '17

Not soon enough. > Is it a silly prank, a Pagan ritual, or a genius discovery about the > next era of mass transit? In a picture posted to Flickr by artist > James Bridle—known for coining the term, "New Aesthetic"—a car is > sitting in the middle of a parking lot has been surrounded by a magic > salt circle. In the language of road markings, the dotted white lines > on the outside say, "Come On In," but the solid white line on the > inside says, "Do Not Cross." To the car's built-in cameras, these are > indomitable laws of magic: Petrificus Totalus for autonomous automobiles. > > Captioned simply, "Autonomous Trap 001," the scene evokes a world of > narratives involving the much-hyped technology of self-driving cars. > It could be mischievous hackers disrupting a friend's self-driving > ride home; the police seizing a dissident's getaway vehicle; highway > robbers trapping their prey; witches exorcizing a demon from their > hatchback. https://creators.vice.com/en_us/article/meet-the-artist-using-ritual-magic-…

3 2

FBI Says It Can't Find Hackers to Hire Because They All Smoke Pot
by Razer 21 Mar '17

21 Mar '17

Maybe that's why they hire Used Furniture Salesmen > http://www.salon.com/2014/07/13/fbi_cyber_expert_is_ex_discount_furniture_s… > The agency's current regs say that the lawmen won't hire someone who > has "smoked" marijuana in the last three years. (No word on dabs, > edibles and other forms of marijuana consumption.) https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-fbi-cant-find-hackers-that-d…

2 2

US: Constitutional Convention?
by grarpamp 20 Mar '17

20 Mar '17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUYYohMZak4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj9DJej3Zi8 https://www.youtube.com/results?q=constitutional+convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendments_to_the_Unite… Gov. Abbott calls for Convention of States, offers amendments to U.S. Constitution FOX 7 Austin Streamed live on Jan 8, 2016 At Texas Public Policy gathering, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called for a Convention of States to pass nine amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It's part of Abbott's Texas Plan to "restore the Rule of Law and return the Constitution to its intended purpose." The plan offers nine amendments to rein in the federal government and restore the balance of power between the States and the United States. The amendments are: -Prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one State. -Require Congress to balance its budget. -Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from creating federal law. -Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from preempting state law. -Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision. -Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law. -Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution. -Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds. -Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a federal law or regulation.

4 6

#DeleteTheDisruptors: Uber Prez Quits After Six Months
by Razer 20 Mar '17

20 Mar '17

> ...Jones felt the current crises facing the firm are not what he > signed up for. > McClatchy: Uber’s president joins the #DeleteUber movement, quitting after six months on the job http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article139558078.html > > Uber’s financial backers include Goldman Sachs, Google Ventures, and > four other private equity groups. Perhaps Uber’s biggest financial > backer is TPG Capital. Co-founder of TPG, David Bonderman, one of the > wealthiest men on earth, is now on Uber’s board of directors. > Bonderman’s personal net worth is somewhere in the ballpark of $2.6 > billion. TPG reportedly has $55 billion in funds under management > making it one of the largest private equity firms in the world. > > Uber’s other investors like Menlo Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and > First Round Capital are pretty typical of Silicon Valley’s private > equity network. The firms are owned and run by mostly white men with > Ivy League college pedigrees, places like Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, > Yale and other bastions of privilege... > October 18, 2013 Sharing Rides, Hoarding Profits by Darwin Bond-Graham “Disruption” is the zeitgeist of Silicon Valley’s tech industry, especially in the realm of startups. The mythos goes like this: small scrappy hackers with very little capital and a few computers can create new business models that will topple older fossilized companies, even whole industries. In the process the economy will become more efficient and everyone will have more choices. We all win thanks to the new Internet-enabled economy. That’s not at all what is happening in reality, however. The ideology of disruption goes back a long way in the annals theorizing capitalism, but the current ideology really owes more to Clayton Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and devout Mormon who has built his academic career on case studies of disruptors. Christensen’s seminal 1998 article in the Harvard Business Review on disruption tells a story about dominant companies atop their industries —Firestone, Xerox, IBM— that were caught flat footed, and in several cases destroyed, by their smaller creative competitors. They failed to innovate and grow beyond their core markets. They failed to recognize the potential of a new technology that would make their existing products and services obsolete. This has fidelity with the actual history of American business. Christensen, along with his son Matthew, manages a hedge fund that purports to bet on disruptors and short the stock of bumbling giants. Christensen also sponsors a think tank he named after himself, the Christensen Institute, which, according to its web site is, “dedicated to improving the world through disruptive innovation.” California’s tech entrepreneurs have embraced Christensenian disruption. The big case studies in tech that seem to confirm Christensen’s theory are well known. Digital cameras destroyed film. Personal computers displaced mainframes as the core hardware business, and laptops have since eaten into a huge share of the personal computer market. Now mobile devices are eroding PC sales. None was ever seen as a threat to the existing dominant product and producer, but displacement happened nonetheless. Tapes replaced vinyl, CDs replaced tapes, but MP3s and iTunes-like services have replaced CDs. Cloud is displacing both the idea of storing your data on physical drives you own. Software as a service is chipping away at the idea of buying and owning software. And so on… In a lot of cases disruption ends up being a battle of big corporations for market share. Consumers and employees within the industry aren’t necessarily better or worse off when the smoke clears and a winner emerges with a new technology and business model. But the tech boom today is characterized by a another kind of disruption. It’s social disruption. New technologies and business models don’t just attack the existing dominant corporations; they attack social relations and transform non-business spheres of life into methodical instances of economic exchange from which the new tech innovators extract revenue. The tech boom is also characterized by disruption of smaller competitive markets by emergent tech monopolists backed ultimately by huge pools of private equity and giant, monopoly-seeking corporations. The winners and losers in many cases of disruption are split along existing racial and class lines of inequality. Those with little economic or political power to defend themselves from the disruptors are seeing their livelihoods and communities turned upside down. Their small businesses are being destroyed. Their communities are becoming unaffordable. Those with cultural capital, and access to economic capital have a shot at being disruptive, at skimming some wealth off of deregulated industry and precarious labor. And the wealthy individuals and companies that should be disrupted by a clever tech startup —the tax dodging banks, the Fortune 500, the health care companies and insurance giants— have the resources to defend themselves, fend off the geeks, deploy an equally clever response to retain market share, or to just buyout the scrappy competitor and fold it into their existing empire. The ridesharing phenomenon reflects all of this and more. Ridesharing companies like Lyft, Uber, and Sidecar use the ubiquitous ownership of smartphones to connect casual drivers and passenger clients through their proprietary applications. Like any broker they take their cut of the revenue in these transactions, (Lyft, for example, skims 20 percent off each payment made by a passenger through their smartphone.) Ridesharing companies encourage unregulated, hyper-privatized transactions among precarious laborers. Their business model relies on marketizing formerly non-economic spheres of life, like giving a friend a ride in your car, and they have aggressively externalized costs like gas, insurance, payroll, etc. so that profits are maximized and expenses are as close as possible to nonexistent. In doing so they undermine the very existence of the taxi industry, but they also undermine public infrastructure in toto. Taxis are not just some private sector dinosaur that should be hit from an innovation meteor. Taxis are an integral part of every major city’s transportation infrastructure. Taxis have been strictly regulated to ensure that the industry’s companies and contractor-drivers pay revenue into the city for the infrastructure they use: roads, signals, bridges, signs, sidewalks, etc. In San Francisco taxis generate over ten million dollars each year in revenue for the city to spend on maintaining transport infrastructure. The funds also pay for the costs of regulating the industry through the Taxi Commission. Regulators attempt to shape the industry in important ways to make it more accessible and equitable and therefore democratic. For example, San Francisco’s taxi fleet is 85 percent hybrid or CNG fueled, reducing the fleet’s carbon emissions and improving the health of city residents. This environmental standard is only possible because the industry is regulated, and ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft undermine this effort. Taxis are also required not to discriminate among passengers, and to serve all parts of the city, among other things that might not be maximally profitable. It’s this public transportation infrastructure, a big part of which is comprised of taxis, that is being disrupted by the ridesharing companies who have inserted themselves as for-profit brokers in the transportation commons. The people who will lose the most from the unbridled rise of ridesharing are those employed by the taxi industry which is seeing profits disappear. San Francisco’s taxi industry is very decentralized and highly competitive. There are about 31 cab companies today served by 10 dispatch companies, some quite big and some very small. No single firm is dominant. There are about 1,500 cabs authorized to drive within the city. The taxi industry employees several thousand workers. Taxi drivers are predominantly immigrants and people of color, and the average cabbie earns a very low yearly income. In 2000 upwards of 57 percent of San Francisco cab drivers were immigrants, with the largest groups having arrived from South Asia, East Asia, Russia and Africa. Of the 1,540 taxi drivers in the San Francisco, San Mateo, Redwood City metro region the hourly mean wage last year was $14.17, and the annual mean income was a mere $22,440. When people say the taxi industry is “ripe for disruption,” what they’re saying, besides the real inefficiencies and problems affecting most big city taxi operations, is that it is a decentralized, highly competitive industry, most of whose owners and operators are low-income people of color, many of who are immigrants. They are susceptible because they are marginalized, and because they lack political and economic clout. In San Francisco the cabbies are definitely a noisy political lobby, but up against the tech and venture capital bosses and entrepreneurs, who are most influential in the Mayor’s office, the cab drivers are impotent. That’s who is being disrupted, a competitive industry that is owned by, and which employes, working class people of color. So who’s doing the disrupting? Who benefits from this attack on the taxi industry, and more generally on the principle of a regulated transportation sector? The two biggest ridesharing companies in San Francisco are Uber and Lyft. Although they virtually didn’t exist until two years ago, between them they have raised about $390 million over the past 2 years according to securities filings with the state and SEC. Uber and Lyft are quickly expanding their ridesharing enterprises to New York, LA, Chicago, and other cities far beyond the laboratory of San Francisco. Where is this money coming from? Uber’s financial backers include Goldman Sachs, Google Ventures, and four other private equity groups. Perhaps Uber’s biggest financial backer is TPG Capital. Co-founder of TPG, David Bonderman, one of the wealthiest men on earth, is now on Uber’s board of directors. Bonderman’s personal net worth is somewhere in the ballpark of $2.6 billion. TPG reportedly has $55 billion in funds under management making it one of the largest private equity firms in the world. Uber’s other investors like Menlo Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and First Round Capital are pretty typical of Silicon Valley’s private equity network. The firms are owned and run by mostly white men with Ivy League college pedigrees, places like Stanford, Cornell, Harvard, Yale and other bastions of privilege. The partners at these firms are millionaires, and billionaires are not uncommon. They leverage pension fund, university endowment, and sovereign wealth dollars to invest in speculative ventures as well as established companies (and from their limited partners they extract hefty management fees). To call them members of the 1% would be inaccurate. Many of Silicon Valley’s private equity investors quality as bona fide members of the 0.1% due to the enormous sums of wealth and income at their command. While most are socially liberal, many of them make political investments with influential Democratic and Republican members of Congress to ensure the country’s tax code and business laws allow them maximally build their fortunes. Lyft’s financial beneficiaries are similarly elite members of the economic hierarchy. Earlier this year Zimride, the ridesharing company that developed Lyft, sold its Zimride ride-sharing application to Enterprise Holdings for an undisclosed sum. (Zimride was the equivalent of a combined craigslist ride-sharing bulletin board and Facebook.) Enterprise Holdings is a giant global corporation that booked $15.4 billion in revenue last year. As a private corporation, Enterprise is owned and controlled by the Taylor family of St. Louis. Jack Taylor, the family’s patriarch, is reportedly worth $11 billion. The Enterprise acquisition of Zimride is an example of how powerful corporate interest often respond to potential disruptors who might undermine their existing product; they purchase them and integrate them into their larger operations. In this case Enterprise, which peddles rental cars it owns, saw Zimride as something that could disrupt their profit stream, so Enterprise gobbled up the disruptor. The way Enterprise does business is changing as a result, but the distribution of economic power isn’t shifting. Zimride’s Lyft ridesharing product which directly competes with taxi companies and bigger competitors like Uber received $80 million this year, mostly from the Andreessen Horowitz private equity firm. Again, Andreessen Horowitz is about as wealthy and establishment as you can imagine in American business. Marc Adreesseen, who half the firm is named for, got rich from developing one of the first web browsers. From the fortune he obtained doing that he invested in other big tech companies and became wealthy. Today Andreessen is a director of HP and Ebay, two Fortune 500 companies, as well as a director of Facebook. Ben Horowitz (son of the arch-conservative David Horowitz) was a founder of Opsware, a company Hewlett Packard bought for over a billion dollars back in 2007. Andreessen was a funder of that company. Opsware was possibly a disruptor to established tech companies like HP, so HP devoured it. Andreessen Horowitz manages probably upwards of $3 billion, and they have dozens of investments. They’re major backers of other disruptive tech startups like Airbnb and Udacity, two companies that are similar to ridesharing in that they are threatening the welfare and livelihoods of low-income communities. Look across the other smaller ridesharing startups that are competing for market share in this gold rush sector and you’ll see similar stories, fast growing companies with very disruptive business plans backed by very powerful investors. The people who’s lives will be most disrupted are going to be the less powerful working class who toil in the competitive and disorganized taxi and other transit industries. The public sector will be disrupted as it is partially privatized and as regulations are undermined in favor of new rules that allow tech companies to externalize costs as much as possible onto precarious workers. More and more parts of our lives will be transformed into relationships of market exchange. As San Francisco’s recent battles over ridesharing show, this is by no means a “natural” process. It’s politically determined as to what kind of economy we want, and how the rules of the economy will distribute wealth and income and provision for public goods. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/18/sharing-rides-hording-profits/

1 0

Best@Muckrock digs more CIA MKULTRA mind control
by grarpamp 20 Mar '17

20 Mar '17

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/feb/08/senate-worried-psychic-p… https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00787r0005002400… Senate worried CIA’s psychic program was part of mind control plot “I am glad that this classified and I believe that it should stay classified.” mkultra, stargate, crest, esp, parapsychology, etc

3 2

Bitcoin Battle Over Fees and Scaling, Cryptocurrencies Become Politically Bulletproof?
by grarpamp 20 Mar '17

20 Mar '17

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin+btc/ Keeps going on and on and on, consuming much in fire over two years. Meanwhile seems they forgot about onboarding retail commerce and p2p as one of a number of important and necessary fundamental underpinnings. And cryptocurrencies haven't even begun to do real battle with govt's yet. Except for the ETF getting shot down by SEC over surveillance, and the DAO being looked at sideways by legal pundits, and banks randomly closing accounts, and the IRS compelling exchange records. With all the self inflicted wounding and etc, the current $1000/BTC, or that of any potential leading crypto, is easily 10x too low, so long as battles subside, tech scale and adoption improves, and govt's remain hands off (no active anti legislation). As they now uses Signal Crypto App once someone showed them "benefits"... Will govt's ever move to kill / revert cryptocurrencies once it dawns on all their members they can hide all their corruption money in it too? And also make mad money by signaling a strong "yes" after they simply personal buy in early? To the early cpunk adopters the spoils of the subsequent influx (be it from any the above takeups - buy in, corrupt, mass "yes")? Any sense of preliminary to "yes" buy-ins or corrupt taking place to date? How much is just one piece of pepperoni on that 10000 btc pizza going for these days? Time to by some pepperoni fragments perhaps?

1 1

NY State: Going Retard on Speech, Except to Torture Felons More
by grarpamp 20 Mar '17

20 Mar '17

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/15/n-y-bil… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T6eJEJZHzo&list=PLFEDD4313D721F0D0&index=12 Freedom of Speech, Just Watch What You Say...

2 2

US Torture goes to Supreme Court
by grarpamp 20 Mar '17

20 Mar '17

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/arti… In a first, former CIA captive appeals Guantánamo trial to Supreme Court GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba Lawyers for the man accused of orchestrating the USS Cole bombing are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in the military tribunal here using accounts of the captive’s CIA torture drawn from declassified documents and an interrogator’s recent memoirs. The 38-page petition with hundreds of pages of supporting documents describes Abd al Rahim al Nashiri’s being sodomized, kept naked and kenneled like a dog, crammed into a box the size of an office safe and being threatened with a revved power drill while hanging shackled and nude from a cell ceiling. And that’s from the portion that isn’t blacked out. New documents include an Army sanity board report and a prosecution chronology of the captive’s time in the Black Sites. Both are heavily redacted. In the petition, the Pentagon-paid lawyers ask the justices to let them challenge Nashiri’s U.S. military detention in federal court — now, before his Guantánamo death-penalty tribunal — because the CIA subjected him to years of “physical, psychological and sexual torture.” They also asked the justices to resolve the open legal question of when the “War on Terror” began. A lower court ruled that civilian courts should stay out of the Nashiri case until the Saudi’s capital war crimes trial is over. His is the first case of a former CIA captive appealing to the Supreme Court. At the war court last Wednesday, defense attorney Rick Kammen notified the tribunal judge, Air Force Col. Vance Spath, of the once-classified filing. Lawyers for the Saudi submitted the document to the Supreme Court on Jan. 17. It took the court’s “Classified Information Security Officer” two months to decide which parts the public could see. ‘CIA agents subjected petitioner to the most extreme forms of torture and abuse in which our country has ever engaged.’ Large portions of the supporting documents are completely blacked out, and perhaps 20 percent of the petition. More...

1 0