On 2020-10-16 05:43, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:40:35 -0400 Robert Hettinga wrote:

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Part 2. Two more to go...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=n4qonsvSgAg&app=desktop

So speaking of NSA shills, that's exactly the sort of thing I would expect from one. The promotin of the idea that 'crypto' is a weapon against tyranny when in practice it serves the tyrants a lot more than it serves their victims.

Cryptography is what allows big brother to control all of their big brother backdoored hardware, for instance.

Crypto is a munition. You want to deny us weapons, but do not want the government denied weapons. Which is the position of every NSA shill whenever a committee gets together to construct a cryptographic standard. StrongSwan uses NSA approved standards. Wireguard uses no NSA standards, relying instead entirely on standards approved by Jon Callas as unelected president for life of symmetric cryptography and Daniel Bernstein as God King of asymmetric cryptography. So, do you oppose us using Wireguard to avoid exposing ips associated with the physical address where the state can find people to beat up?

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 08:45:53PM -0300, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 09:04:50 +1000 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:

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On 2020-10-16 05:43, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

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On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:40:35 -0400 Robert Hettinga wrote:

...

Part 2. Two more to go...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=n4qonsvSgAg&app=desktop

So speaking of NSA shills, that's exactly the sort of thing I would expect from one. The promotin of the idea that 'crypto' is a weapon against tyranny when in practice it serves the tyrants a lot more than it serves their victims.

Cryptography is what allows big brother to control all of their big brother backdoored hardware, for instance.

Crypto is a munition. You want to deny us weapons, but do not want the government denied weapons.

Too bad I never said that. What I'm saying is that you are a government shill who scams people telling them that cryptography helps ordinary folks when in reality, as I said, cryptography helps govcorp enslave ordinary folks.

Try sticking to your earlier version: "cryto appears to help gov more than individuals", since most folks might agree with that... so then our dilemma is clear, as the task ahead becomes "how can we have any particular $TECH be benefit more to the people than gov".

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Which is the position of every NSA shill

you are a trump shill, which means you are the US government shill (like the rest of trumpofascists). Since the NSA is a key part of the govt, you are also the NSA shill who has never spoken against tor and the NSA shill who lies about the practical uses of cryptography.

False dichotomies are a cheap way to end a conversation. Sometimes a false dichotomy can be a useful conversational technique - e.g. as a shit test, an IQ test, a conversation end game (if you've had enough), and perhaps more. But overuse becomes tiresome and "cheap".

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StrongSwan uses NSA approved standards. Wireguard uses no NSA standards, relying instead entirely on standards approved by Jon Callas

another clown

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as unelected president for life of symmetric cryptography and Daniel Bernstein as God King of asymmetric cryptography.

So, do you oppose us using Wireguard to avoid exposing ips associated with the physical address where the state can find people to beat up?

you can use whatever you want. All your 'cypherpunk' projects are useless trash running on fully backdoored hardware, and you know it.

That's a difficult argument to dispute, because rather than being an argument, it's a fact. Our dilemma is not an easy one...

Guess what, you get flying colors in the shill test. You are a shill for the US government, for fake 'cypherpunk' opposition and for the KKK, off the top of my head.

And I'm adding this bit again beacuse it's just too good. From the linked video, according to narcho-fascist, techo-fascist jew friedman :

"technology is in the process of giving us a level of privacy we've never had before"

Yes, 'technology' is giving us a level of privacy we've never had before : ZERO PRIVACY. You have to be a clown like friedman to achieve such cosmic level of involuntary self-parody.

Oh and yes of course, friedman is yet another right-wing NSA shill telling people that NSA 'technology' gives them 'privacy'.

Juan, your presentment is often very enjoyable, often bring smiles, laughter and chuckles because there is a lot of truth in what you say. Peace y'allll,

On 10/15/20, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 09:04:50AM +1000, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:

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On 2020-10-16 05:43, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

...

On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 13:40:35 -0400 Robert Hettinga wrote:

...

Part 2. Two more to go...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=n4qonsvSgAg&app=desktop

So speaking of NSA shills, that's exactly the sort of thing I would expect from one. The promotin of the idea that 'crypto' is a weapon against tyranny when in practice it serves the tyrants a lot more than it serves their victims.

Cryptography is what allows big brother to control all of their big brother backdoored hardware, for instance.

Crypto is a munition. You want to deny us weapons, but do not want the government denied weapons.

I have to disagree, and the noise of Juan's anger is perhaps what makes it sometimes difficult to hear him, but it seems his position is that "all tech that gets created, gets used -more- by the fascist MIC regime dominating us all" and the obvious conclusion from this apparently correct observation is "so why the hell would you create more, or promote, any such tech?"

This argument (if I've paraphrased Juan correctly) is quite compelling - it's not obviously wrong.

So we are presented with a dilemma - you could say Juan takes a strong position on one side of that dilemma, but that's not the problem here (in fact, Juan's strong position helps us to see more clearly, the very dilemma we are faced with).

The problem is not Juan's position on this dilemma, the problem is in fact the dilemma itself.

The video makes it pretty clear that cypherpunks were holding the role of addressing that dilemma, right inside technology.

On 10/15/20, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

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The video makes it pretty clear that cypherpunks were holding the role of addressing that dilemma, right inside technology.

s/role/intention/

Cypherpunks are supposed to hold the -intention- to benefit the lower downs/ the people/ human rights, rather than govcorp.

Juan's (largely correct) point is that the pudding has proved something close to the opposite of that intention - total take surveillance, zero privacy, owelling fascism racing down the pipeline to keep us all in line (face/retina scanning, social credit, no travel/train tickets except you have the chip of the beast and a "sufficiently positive" social credit score, for just a few examples...)

this movement from role to intention is happening in every aspect of society as those with the ability to influence and spy alter peoples' impacts. what's probably important here is that some technologies, when stolen by the government, give the government more power than the people, and some do not. additionally, some things stimulate the government to get defensive and out-research them, and some do not.

On 10/15/20, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

On Fri, 16 Oct 2020 12:14:38 +1100 Zenaan Harkness wrote:

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Cypherpunks are supposed to hold the -intention- to benefit the lower downs/ the people/ human rights, rather than govcorp.

Juan's (largely correct) point is that the pudding has proved something close to the opposite of that intention - total take surveillance, zero privacy, owelling fascism racing down the pipeline to keep us all in line

yep the proof is in the eating and this crypto pudding turned out to be quite toxic.

And so, people who seem to ignore how bad the situation is, and keep telling us that 'more cryto' is going to 'end tyranny' are 'in my opinion' mentally challenged, or shills.

And no, I don't think that's a false dichotomy. People can make honest mistakes only to some degree. If somebody keeps making the same mistake over and over again he's either stupid, or is doing it on purpose.

or tasked with it.

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(face/retina scanning, social credit, no travel/train tickets except you have the chip of the beast and a "sufficiently positive" social credit score, for just a few examples...)

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 11:20:36PM -0400, grarpamp wrote:

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'more crypto' is going to 'end tyranny' are 'in my opinion' mentally challenged

Yes, it is not mere existance of widespread crypto that wins... for example TLS is now almost 100% coverage, the dream of early cypherpunks, yet YouTube still blocks the fuck out of those trying to 'end tyranny', and sites still take down AP docs. What wins is what you do over crypto, what comms and convos, and what ideas can be shared freely and further developed, that can begin to coordinate and have impact... not much different than in physical world. Given strong crypto and correct usage, it is possible to bring some p2p methods from the physical world, into the digital. However digital still has limitations, Sybil Agents always exist, not even physical world is free from those. Yet for so long as any crypto hedge and edge exists no matter how marginal, over the tyrants capacity to break and shut it down... free comms, the punk distribution and instillment of ideas out to the masses, can begin to eat away at tyranny's narrative. Same as in the physical world, the end of tyranny comes only from what you do, and how hard, fast, focused and broad, you push the front. Push it.

The biggest present danger is the (((walled gardens of censorship))). That won't stop this humble techno punk from having a crack at a better than Tor version of Tor, but I have no doubt that if it is sufficiently "liberating of Peer 2 Peer free speech", then the PlayStore and Apple's whatever the damn thing is called, will "be ordered" to eliminate that app from "their" stores... This is just one front of the digital (((czars of censorship))) wars, but it's a big one. A solid trend towards actual liberating of all Android phones is going to be needed, for starters. That will not protect us from the closed hardware, closed source, baseband CPUs accessing all memory and therefore keys, but it will at least allow folks to run the few apps that arise out of some future overlay if it appears sufficiently sufficient for at least certain p2p free speech purposes... There's money in that too ... $50 to install Juan-Droid or John-Droid or Grar-Droid or Zen-Droid, and once you've done it a few times, it gets easier and quicker, and then resell your local/national telco plans and bundle an extra $10 per phone for monthly Debian-Droid updates... this is a -very- workable plan financially. The big lubricator of this "Libre-Droid your mobile" cottage industry plan, is going to be an app or USB developer mode uplink or whatever it's called, to dump: [ contacts, SMSes, photos, music, etc ] and re-upload that data onto your paying customer's "Libre-Droid"ed phone. Then enable Debian security updates and rake in $10 per month per phone. And that $10 per month per phone, is a "relatively high, morally speaking" $10 per month per phone - you are liberating their phone, increasing (arguably) their "security", ensuring they can run the "JuanoNet" chaff fill overlay everyone's been twittering about, putting the money you make to good use living your own life and furthering your causes. Then, you (and 100's of others just like you) and your business (and 100s of others just like yours, all over the world) can market to all your JuanDroid groupies a new phone which they may wish to upgrade to, with a slick flashy brocheur, and for only $20 a month they can get a flashy new PinePhone, unlimited JuanoNet wifi mesh downloads (P2P neighbours permitting), and whatever GiBs you can wrangle out of your local telco. And for $90 a month, they can obtain a spanking new Librem 5ive phone... yadda yadda, you get the picture...

On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 01:43:55PM +1000, jamesd@echeque.com wrote:

On 2020-10-16 19:33, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

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That won't stop this humble techno punk from having a crack at a better than Tor version of Tor, but I have no doubt that if it is sufficiently "liberating of Peer 2 Peer free speech", then the PlayStore and Apple's whatever the damn thing is called, will "be ordered" to eliminate that app from "their" stores...

There is an inherent problem with Tor, in that it attempts to provide responsiveness comparable to regular IP, and this exposes it to timing based attacks.

For text messages, and blog like websites, we don't actually need that performance. Send all data to everyone, flood filling it usenet style, or if that is too much data, to everyone subscribing to a stream, flood fill it around usent style plus bittorrent style, so that everyone has a copy of everything, so when you interact with a website, it is locally on your computer, and your replies get flood filled back to the original website and everyone reading the original website, after a considerable delay and through many intermediaries.

This is one part/possible solution. Statistical/hash based (part-)content distribution to $N peers may significantly reduce net wide storage requirements for example. Those with minimal reading/ participating interests, may still want to cache $MORE if that improves the size of the haystack in which they wish to hide needles. Different operational prefs and therefore configs etc.

Zeronet almost does this, you can have things that function like websites, but it does not support things that function like blogs, though it could and should.

I feel confident we will solve a lot of these issues in a relatively generic way.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 03:27:32PM +0100, Peter Fairbrother wrote:

On 16/10/2020 00:55, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

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[...] the noise of Juan's anger is perhaps what makes it sometimes difficult to hear him, but it seems his position is that "all tech that gets created, gets used -more- by the fascist MIC regime dominating us all" and the obvious conclusion from this apparently correct observation is "so why the hell would you create more, or promote, any such tech?"

This argument (if I've paraphrased Juan correctly) is quite compelling - it's not obviously wrong.

I don't think that's really Juan's argument, but if it is there are at least two flaws - first, the assumption that "all tech that gets created gets used -more- by the fascist MIC regime" is demonstrably wrong.

Second it is incomplete - to a large extent cypherpunk has prevented the formation of a "Ministry of Truth" - if only through the publicity, but see below as well.

Where the argument has some tangential validity is in that that all of the five main "successes" of cypherpunks don't actually work - they fail to deliver the promised anonymity or confidentiality reliably on the individual user level.

These "successes" are first PGP. Whether it would have worked or not I don't know, but no-one wrote decent software for it, and it failed the eighth law - "A system which is hard to use will be abused or unused."

Second, remailers, which could be effectively anonymous if they were widely used. Again user-friendly software is missing, which decreases the anonymity set and thus the anonymity to the point where it is dubious.

Third, BitCoin, where scalability is a problem, the interface between technology and people is left to the clueless users, and where there is a huge publicly available ledger. Any cryptocurrency where the coins are not indistinguishable is never going to provide

Fourth, BitTorrent, which doesn't really provide any anonymity - quite the opposite.

Fifth, TOR, whose shortcomings are too well-known for me to have to enumerate them here again.

OK, so you've laid out problems for "the people" with each of the "five main successes of cypherpunks" and so you prove this part of Juan's point, that none of these 5 cypherpunk tools have ultimately hit the mark and provided the promised privacy (we can stick to just one "promise" at this point, since it's never been delivered).

But these and other now-becoming-mainstream crypto technologies like Apple's encryption have raised the bar against the creation of a "Ministry of Truth"

Now that's an assertion...

where all of everybody's data and conversations are available to the Ministry.

...which you just disproved with the last part of your sentence. "Full take" of metadata is already publicly acknowledged. There is no doubt in anyone's mind that all (!) 'interesting' targets have "full take" of their actual data (not just metadata), consumed into The Beast (and think that with clearnet bittorrent, only the metadata hash of "which torrent" needs to be stored for everyone who downloads a torrent (say of anarchist books) and just one copy only of the torrent itself, to have "full take" of both metadata AND data! Same applies with certain other up/downloads. Certainly all SMSes are full take as of years ago, and compressed audio of phone calls not long after that. Next, since almost everyone does NOT (as you correctly point out above) use PGP but just emails their Word docs, PDFs etc around en clair, again just a single copy of the document and "hash as metadata" for everyone who sent/received a copy - NO doubt gmail etc does this (it's the only sane implementation, especially with Git having lead the charge on actual content addressing). So what are we left with? Just the rare ones who actually use PGP - absolutely miniscule, so just "full take their data" until you crack/hack/infiltrate/steal their keys, then unlock and analyse, and now the occasional end to end encryption which is outside of the CIA NSA shills known as "Silicon Valley" - so here you use your proprietary baseband hardware and a few snippets of simple grep code to grab all keys of interest, do full take on the data and whammo, you've captured the world. And apparently the primary datastore for all this is Utah. Backup? Who knows who cares. ... And you're trying to tell us "everyone's data is NOT available to the Ministry, because Cypherpunks" ??? I wish it were not so, but you seem to have disproved your own thesis - and provided additional support for Juan's thesis.

Actually I suppose it is now more a case of "anybody's" rather than "everybody's".

Nope, you got it right the first time, The Ministry's Utah datacenter does full take, of -everybody-, not just anybody :/ :\ :/

On 2020-10-17 05:13, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

What I said is not even an argument, but an observation. Govcorp gets a lot more 'value' out of cryptography than govcorp's subjects.

And government gets a lot more value out of guns than its subjects get out of guns. That is a piss poor argument against guns. We need guns, and we need cryptography.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 09:15:32PM -0300, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

On Sat, 17 Oct 2020 08:40:03 +1000 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:

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On 2020-10-17 05:13, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

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What I said is not even an argument, but an observation. Govcorp gets a lot more 'value' out of cryptography than govcorp's subjects.

And government gets a lot more value out of guns than its subjects get out of guns.

That is correct and is another instance of the same problem. Also, in the US cesspool guns is something that right-wingers who are constantly sucking cops' dicks have. Guns in the hands of government-worshipping-fascists are yet another threat to freedom.

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That is a piss poor argument against guns. We need guns, and we need cryptography.

like I said, these are facts, not 'arguments'. But I know, right-wingers have the g'd given right to ignore any facts that offend them.

Given how vehemently, persistently (even "religiously") that "the left" targets the removal of guns, the removal of the second amendment, it looks to some like guns ARE a thawn in the side of the empire. It makes no sense for "regular folks" to give up their guns, just as it makes no sense for regular folks to give up their crypto (no matter how poor it is). And again to brand us all "fascist bigots" does not sound like an argument, but sounds like an ad hom. "Work with what you got", surely? Our guns are under attack, so we use that attack, really -use- that attack as Judo pros (well, we might not be very professional about it :D ). Govcorp wants to backdoor crypto by statute? Sounds like an attack by the empire against another thorn in its other side - let's use more, not less, of that thorn. The challenge and quantum of the problem, does not mean we ought shirk the fixing. Yes, we -should- remain on high alert to how to maximise "the people's" use of various tools, be it guns or crypto.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 11:14:06PM -0300, Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

On Sat, 17 Oct 2020 11:30:24 +1100 Zenaan Harkness wrote:

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Given how vehemently, persistently (even "religiously") that "the left" targets the removal of guns, the removal of the second amendment, it looks to some like guns ARE a thawn in the side of the empire.

No, it's just another pointless, idiotic, partisan 'issue'. Like, say, abortion.

And of course you ignored what I said. The kind of assholes who have guns in the US are the same assholes who love cops and love to shoot brown people.

Now you're into Karl's old position of "Whites killing Blacks for sport". You seriously need to start backing that up (at least, if you want to be taken seriously) and perhaps also consider narrowing your target down from "all people who own guns", since such generality simply isn't taken seriously - it's the kind of argument that leads Oxdynamite to label the maker of such an argument "a shill", and his labelling is frankly more compelling than "the argument".

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It makes no sense for "regular folks" to give up their guns, just as it makes no sense for regular folks to give up their crypto (no matter how poor it is).

And again to brand us all "fascist bigots" does not sound like an argument, but sounds like an ad hom.

https://blog.jim.com/crypto/silk-road-2-0-goes-down/#comments jim says: 2014-11-09 at 21:29

"Consider Trayvon Martin. His abuse of over the counter drugs caused brain damage, resulting outbursts of irrational violence. But should we therefore ban Robitussin for everyone? No, we should only ban it for blacks.

The kind of people who buy drugs on the Silk Road are not the kind of people who cause problems by their drug consumption. Superior people need freedom. Inferior people need supervision."

to state the obvious, you cannot take anything said by a bigot like James seriously.

I'm hearing what you're saying. Are you hearing what he is saying? If you suggest there is no possible "truth" in that quoted statement, perhaps there is none, but perhaps we (and by "we" I mean values of "we" which correspond to "you") ought look a little deeper than the superficial reactive: Could there be a correlation between IQ, and ability to handle the side effects of Robitussin? That is, could it be true that those with low IQ are more likely to "lose it publicly" than those with a higher IQ? (To be sure, I do not know the answer to that question, I'm just considering the possibility...) And if that question can be answered in the affirmative, can we then "give reasonable meaning" to the phrase "inferior people" by substituting it with "low IQ individuals" ?? The mind of open inquiry does not dismiss such questions merely "because they are distasteful" - facts are facts, and our job is to discover them.

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"Work with what you got", surely?

Our guns are under attack, so we use that attack, really -use- that attack as Judo pros (well, we might not be very professional about it :D ).

Govcorp wants to backdoor crypto by statute? Sounds like an attack by the empire against another thorn in its other side - let's use more, not less, of that thorn.

Notice how you flip like a pancake. Yesterday you pretended to understand the problem, now you're shilling for more 'technology'.

Notice how you're trying to hold me to a dichotomy: 1) I'm "allowed" to understand one of the problems of technology. 2) I'm "not allowed" to consider that a dissident using tech for his dissidence, is still useful. Disallowing your target (in this case me) from holding these two positions simultaneously, can be called trying to hold me to a dichotomy. Now, if those two statements 1) and 2) truly are mutually exclusive - that is, only one, or the other, can be true at the same time - then yes, it is appropriate to hold me to that dichotomy, to help me clear my muddled thinking. But if those statements can both be true at the same time, then to hold me to choose only one of them to be true, is what we obviously call a false dichotomy. I suggest that in this case, you are attempting to hold me to a false dichotomy.

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The challenge and quantum of the problem, does not mean we ought shirk the fixing.

Yes, we -should- remain on high alert to how to maximise "the people's" use of various tools, be it guns or crypto.

yeah let me know when the US right-wing nazis use their guns against their beloved government. Until then, the fact remains : they are enslaved fucktards who pretend they are 'free' because 'uncle sam' 'protects' them from muslamic 'terrists'. And 'child porn'.

Thats another (possibly) false dichotomy - on a cursory view, it looks to me like a false dichotomy ("except that the US right-wing nazis use their guns against their beloved government, they are enslaved fucktards who pretend they are 'free'"). At least, it looks false to me.

On 2020-10-16 09:55, Zenaan Harkness wrote:

it seems his position is that "all tech that gets created, gets used -more- by the fascist MIC regime dominating us all" and the obvious conclusion from this apparently correct observation is "so why the hell would you create more, or promote, any such tech?"

This argument (if I've paraphrased Juan correctly) is quite compelling - it's not obviously wrong.

If, however it was right, we would not see the government acting to backdoor mainstream crypto (Skype, telegraph, etc) and we would not see obvious NSA shills on cryptography standards committees. The NSA would not have backdoored the elliptic curve on the NSA standard. If they went to the trouble of backdooring that curve, then obviously using Ristretto25519 is going to cause them at least some inconvenience. Snowden tells a tale of giving an agent a doctored usb thumbdrive, which powned whatever computer it was plugged into. Which implies that the computer was not pre powned.

On Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 04:19:53PM +0000, coderman wrote:

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Thursday, October 15, 2020 11:04 PM, wrote: ...

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StrongSwan uses NSA approved standards. Wireguard uses no NSA standards, relying instead entirely on standards approved by Jon Callas as unelected president for life of symmetric cryptography and Daniel Bernstein as God King of asymmetric cryptography.

So, do you oppose us using Wireguard to avoid exposing ips associated with the physical address where the state can find people to beat up?

Wireguard uses entropy instructions like RDRAND directly, with no mixing. Even BSD and Linux know this is a bad idea.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/how-a-months-old-amd-microcode-bug-d...

""" As it turns out, WireGuard relies on RDRAND (when available) to generate new session IDs. The session IDs need to be unique, and WireGuard wants them not to be simple consecutive integers, so it pulls a pseudorandom value from RDRAND, compares it against its existing session ID list to make sure there's no collision, then assigns it to the session.

Read that last part again carefully—it makes sure there's no collision first. If an existing session has the same ID as the new number, WireGuard asks RDRAND for another "random" number, checks it for uniqueness, and so on. Since RDRAND on my system—and any non-microcode-updated Ryzen 3000 system—always returned 0xFFFFFFFF no matter what, that means infinite loop. Infinite loops in kernel code are bad; they introduce you to the value of the hardware reset button in a hurry. """

at least wireguard is fast? :P

HA! That is fire trucking hysterical muh grits. Thanks coderman, important to know. Anyone know if Debian/ Fedora/ Ubuntu patch this underminer away? Not that I've used wireguard yet..