On Monday, October 1, 2018, 9:20:41 AM PDT, juan wrote:  > Jim, are you seriously suggesting that the total and complete surveillance state should be EVEN MORE EXTENSIVE? Are you drunk or something? Actually, it's more accurate for me to claim that YOU must be drunk.  I've merely advocated that technology, in this case smartphones, be useable by people to protect themselves (and others.)  But I do so in spite of the possibility that smartphones could be misused by government, not because of that.  I said absolutely nothing about the "surveillance state", a term which conveniently you fail to define. The first electrical burglar alarm was patented in 1852.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes_(inventor)     That allowed "surveillance", of a very primitive type,  but it was not a part of any "surveillance state".   Smartphones, and even ordinary cell phones before them, had and have security issues.  But to argue that ANY use of them, by individuals to protect themselves, somehow becomes part of the "surveillance state" is nonsense.                    Jim Bell

On Mon, Oct 01, 2018 at 08:32:25PM -0300, Juan wrote:

On Mon, 1 Oct 2018 19:40:25 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:

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On Monday, October 1, 2018, 9:20:41 AM PDT, juan wrote:

 > Jim, are you seriously suggesting that the total and complete surveillance state should be EVEN MORE EXTENSIVE? Are you drunk or something?

Actually, it's more accurate for me to claim that YOU must be drunk.  I've merely advocated that technology, in this case smartphones, be useable by people to protect themselves (and others.)  But I do so in spite of the possibility that smartphones could be misused by government, not because of that.  I said absolutely nothing about the "surveillance state", a term which conveniently you fail to define.

So I have to define "surveillance state" because nobody here is aware of the existence of the surveillance state, especially because this is a (the) crypto anarchist mailing list.

Are you trying to troll me Jim? =)

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The first electrical burglar alarm was patented in 1852.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes_(inventor)     That allowed "surveillance", of a very primitive type,  but it was not a part of any "surveillance state".  

but the police and the phone companies and the 'smart' phone manufacturers are - parts of the surveillance state.

It's likely a fair assertion "all current mobile phone hardware must be considered compromised by the deep state". An initial (though likely as yet, requiring quite a few more steps) step in the right direction may be found here: https://puri.sm/posts/2018-09-librem5-hardware-roadmap-announcement/ https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-17/ (Still on old Galaxy S2 here, waiting for these guys ... supporting those who make such steps is #1 goal!)

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Smartphones, and even ordinary cell phones before them, had and have security issues.  But to argue that ANY use of them, by individuals to protect themselves, somehow becomes part of the "surveillance state" is nonsense.  

"a quick 911-call if necessary." <--- isn't that the magical number to call the pigs?

And I didn't argue that any use of them is part of the surveillance state - only the system you just proposed which includes sending realtime surveillance data to phone companies.

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                 Jim Bell

It's hard to imagine there are NO circumstances where "call the cops" is an appropriate call to make. Here's a point: problems on the one hand, do not invalidate all possible solutions which happen to overlap on the other hand - that's an absolutist position which is likely to be a bucket of cold water on potentially useful discussion. On the third hand, many have used the "dichotomy dialectic" to frequent, and useful, effect - and Jim seems like a pretty solid guy who can stand his ground, so the black and white dichotomy is probably usually useful when jousting with him =D Good luck all,

On Monday, October 1, 2018, 4:30:38 PM PDT, juan wrote: On Mon, 1 Oct 2018 19:40:25 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:

  On Monday, October 1, 2018, 9:20:41 AM PDT, juan wrote:  

Actually, it's more accurate for me to claim that YOU must be drunk.  I've merely advocated that technology, in this case smartphones, be useable by people to protect themselves (and others.)  But I do so in spite of the possibility that smartphones could be misused by government, not because of that.  I said absolutely nothing about the "surveillance state", a term which conveniently you fail to define.

    So I have to define "surveillance state" because nobody here is aware of the existence of the surveillance state, especially because this is a (the) crypto anarchist mailing list. No.  The "surveillance state" arguably exists, although what actually makes it up is debateable.  

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The first electrical burglar alarm was patented in 1852.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Holmes_(inventor)     That allowed "surveillance", of a very primitive type,  but it was not a part of any "surveillance state".  

 >   but the police and the phone companies and the 'smart' phone manufacturers are - parts of the surveillance state.  Again, you need to define what you believe.  None of this is black-and-white.  

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Smartphones, and even ordinary cell phones before them, had and have security issues.  But to argue that ANY use of them, by individuals to protect themselves, somehow becomes part of the "surveillance state" is nonsense.  

  >  "a quick 911-call if necessary." <--- isn't that the magical number to call the pigs?  I think you are merely playing with the argument.  I didn't exclude the possibility that this couldn't also (or alternately) amount to some sort of privatized system.   "the phone companies" are the people who purport to, and do, accept cell-phone data in people's neighborhoods.  We cannot instantly change that fact.  (some communities have WiFi clouds; even better.)   Who else would this system transmit data to, with current technology and installations?  Don't insert your head up your ass.  I DIDN'T say that this "realtime surveillance data" would be completely UNENCRYPTED.   Anyone who pays attention to the CP list should recognize that there are some rather simple protections which can be inserted (given the specific situation)  to deter or prevent misuse, or by delay make such immediate use impossible, yet allow the intended uses to be implemented.  A weak form of encryption that could be cracked within minutes (not milliseconds)  would prohibit real-time misuse.  Or perhaps a trusted third-party could issue "keys" which were automatically unlocked a specific time period later.  (seconds, minutes, whatever)  Or  If a trigger (an attack, for instance) occurs, the user's phone could transmit the current unlock-key to those holding the data, to ensure that it is available. Also, the technology known as "EPIRB" or "ELT" could be used, with additional hardware.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_position-indicating_radiobeacon_stat...   Don't make discussions like this a pain.  Don't automatically accuse people of doing something, merely because they haven't provided all the details.

    And I didn't argue that any use of them is part of the surveillance state - only the system you just proposed which includes sending realtime surveillance data to phone companies. See why you're a jerk?  You COULD have said, "wouldn't the phone company be able to use all this information for malicious purposes, or give it to the government so it could misuse it?   And I would have said, "Are you REALLY suggesting that these OBVIOUS countermeasures WOULDN'T be added in any real system?!?!" And then the rest of us could have had a good laugh, realizing that yet again, Juan was trolling yet again.                                 Jim Bell

On Tuesday, October 2, 2018, 7:39:37 PM PDT, juan wrote: On Tue, 2 Oct 2018 23:28:41 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:     Ok, fair enough. Actually you can and should send the data not to any phone company but to some personal computer you control or some people close to you control (as TDS Zenaan already mentioned)     And the whole system is just some rather simple program running on the phone. You probably can already get such an 'app' in the nsa-google-store? ;)   >  Make sure your backdoored phone doesn't detect your trigger signal and shuts down =)

    I think a good dosis of skepticism regarding technical solutions is warranted, but meh... Ideally, you'd like to have a minute or two of full-motion video prior to an attack, and maybe many minutes (an hour?) of full audio, and something like 1-frame/second prior to thatBut 1 megabyte per second is 3.6 gigabytes/hour, and 3 hours of that, per day on average, is nearly 11 gigabytes/day, or 330 gigabytes/month. What's the solution?  Don't say, "buy one of those unlimited-data plans!".  Those plans are provided, and priced, based on the idea that everybody uses a now-reasonable amount of data, like 5-10 gigabytes/month.  Not 330 gigabytes.    If everybody starts using anywhere near that, the cell company will have to install 10-100x as much transmission ability, and that costs money.  And, they will charge for that service.   How do we do that?  Take advantage of:1.   Most people rarely get attacked.2.   A phone co cell site probably has 10-100x more receive capacity than it on average needs.  Such is necessary for peak moments, which will occasionally exist.  Ordinarily, unused capacity is lost, and isn't used for anything valuable.   Suppose a PBB (personal black box) transmits full-motion video, at maybe 1 megabyte/second, all the time.  But by pre-arrangement,  the phone co merely "parks" the data, near the cell site, and does not attempt to transmit it to "your" computer.   (So, it doesn't need to use its own network to transmit this data.) Most of the time, you don't get attacked, so your PBB eventually tells the cell company, "We aren't going to need 99% of that data, so dump it and send maybe 1% on to my computer".  The material actually sent might be 1 frame/second, maybe 1/30th of 1 megabyte per second, and all of the audio.  This process will be done continuously.   If you DO get attacked, your PBB may get triggered, and maybe it's be able to tell the phone co to "send all the data onwards to my computer".  But if, instead, your phone gets instantly smashed, or sealed in aluminum foil, or shot with a bullet, etc, the cell phone company never gets the "we don't need that data", message:  So the entire amount of data your PBB has collected and sent to the phone co gets transmitted and then  stored on your own computer, including material that was collected from minutes ago, in full-motion video.  So if somebody is attacked and possibly killed, much of the last hour of his life is available in great detail, including full-motion video for the last few minutes, and an hour of good audio, and 1-frame/second video for an hour.  I suspect that there would be very few murders that would not be solved with this data.   To be sure, this doesn't bring the dead guy back to life.  But I expect that in the large majority of cases, it would deter anybody who was thinking of killing the person with the PBB.                       Jim Bell

On Wednesday, October 3, 2018, 10:09:29 AM PDT, juan wrote: On Wed, 3 Oct 2018 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:

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To be sure, this doesn't bring the dead guy back to life.  But I expect that in the large majority of cases, it would deter anybody who was thinking of killing the person with the PBB.  

 >   But you can flip that around. Cops and soldiers are using such a system. So how would libertarians get rid of cops and soldiers? Or politicians. Absolutely true!!!  Technology changes things, possibly a great deal.  

    You are presenting it as a way for innocent people to be protected. But it is also a way for the worst enemies of freedom to be protected. So libertarians should be thinking how to neutralize that sort of system =)

True, quite true.  Or avoid it.  Etc.   That's one thing Cypherpunks should be doing, right now.                    Jim Bell

On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 23:48:00 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:

Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers. 

LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job.

On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 20:52:05 -0400 grarpamp wrote:

On 6/6/20, Punk-Stasi 2.0 wrote:

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On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 23:48:00 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:

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Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers.

LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job.

And how exactly you proposing to stop this "progress" JuanG? How you going to call them wrong state fuckers out? Stop them wrong fucks?

you need a 'critical mass' to be able to fight back. I think I mentioned it a few times by now.

You know how many times people here everywhere been harassed wronged infringed upon by ridiculous "authority" "policy" with no recorded evidence to even fight it or embarass them, share them to world of sheep help wake them, etc.

Let me explain the basics for you : the job of the police is to beat people to death when they don't obey their masters. That's something that ordinary, grown-up fucktards approve of. you want to broadcast it as some kind of 'public' entertainment?

Yeah, unless you JuanG come up with some total solution that whoever likes, they and Jim is always free to see about make and sell crypted recording devices,

he's of course free to keep preaching the infintely idiotic view that 'technology' will magically make people free. An infinitely idiotic view which you share to a fair degree, I believe. And I'm free to comment on it. Now, if you technocrats were able to actually deliver on your 'promises' then I would certainly shut up. But unless you're completely delusional, you have to admit you're getting nowhere and will be microchipped soon.

Alternately... Who loses arms races?

one of the points is, do you remotely think you're in a position to 'win' the arms race or even keep up with it somehow? or is your objective to sell more retardphones because you can record cops...while they dutifully protect the retardphone manufacturers? you have to be pretty arrogant to believe that you're going to beat them at their own game using their own weapons.

How long races last? Who gets smashed along the way?

Even smashing everything still leaves relative problem of authoritarial thoughts over others. Unless you smash all sentient life to dust.

easier to smash politicians first. Before they smash you to dust...while you broadcast it on the arpanet.

Or educate and retrain it away. Then tech does not matter.

Contrariwise, if you mix a fascist 'culture' with 'technology' you get a disaster.

On Sun, 7 Jun 2020 02:52:13 -0400 grarpamp wrote:

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you need a 'critical mass' to be able to fight back.

That is almost too slowly building, if at all.

Exactly right. And that's the sad situation we find ourselves in.

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the job of the police is to beat people to death when they don't obey their masters.

They don't allow that story on YouTube anymore.

what else would you expect from a mosad-nsa propaganda outlet

Officially nowhere else soon with all the proposed "laws".

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you want to broadcast it

If user can't trust FaceTube to livestream and not delete the user's feed, and if the cops delete and smash the device copy of it, and takedown whatever private VPS user sent it to, then it's gone. So yes broadcasting the encrypted stream for all receivers in antenna range to pick up and store is another option

yes, that's a nice trick - which prolly won't work "out of the box" with the majority of retardphones even if the hardware was capable of doing it...if the radios supported ad-hoc networks. then you can of course build your own pair of devices one being a camera with a radio, the other just a receiver. And your own device should be easier to conceal, unlike the typical retardphone. And now you started an electronic warfare war with the 'masters' of war. Good luck.

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'technology' will magically make people free.

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their own weapons

Tech itself, sitting in a box, on the shelf, doing nothing, like an unused cannon, no.

The rest may depend on if cypherpunks tech was to be deployed as partially equalizing force leverage rapide, in time to assist effect change before being crushed out by opposing forces.

Or if it was just a bunch of gov goons and state apologists tripping on acid while typing shit into C compiler in 1990's and dotbomb.

One has to ask, why wasn't cpunk 'tech' more widely deployed in the 1990s? Things like PGP notwithstanding...

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Now, if you technocrats were able to actually deliver on your 'promises'

Tech is one thing, sometimes easily coded and delivered. Teaching and getting people use it for freedom apparently harder. All they used it to make Facebook so far.

Yep. But if you look a bit harder, you'll see that 'tech' is developed only when it leads to outcomes like facebook...and the rest of industrial 'civilization'. Technical developments have never caused political change, contrary to what marxists and other positivists might like to imagine.

They are letting cryptocurrency get fucked and behind advantage too,

well, cryptocurrency exists in the highly toxic enviroment of finance. It's no wonder that a lot of it is controlled by government criminals like coinbase's armstrong.

Because no one is teaching freedom fundamentals.

yep - what people are taught in govcorp schools and 'universities' is the exact opposite.

Only dropping tech on them, so they use it by old wrong teaching.

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will be microchipped soon.

They want it like sheep. All the first world in lead to that hell world.

no doubt a lot of people uncritically accep it. But, it's not 'informed consent'. The people who accept it are grownups 'educated' by govcorp.

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arms race easier to smash politicians first. Before they smash you to dust...

They almost had tiny bit of idea to try smashing in the corona and floyd "revolts", but stopped like sheep when BossGov said stop.

at this point, any 'revolt' should be seen as govcorp wargames "Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-n... so unless the revolt manages to beat to death bezos and the google jews, and post the video on jewtube, it should be regarded as a Fake News Revolt.

They did try some simple old brick and flame tech, and did have some digital new tech in the mix, and so held advantage for a while. But now the Boss Monster is going to get another 10-20 year turn at fucking them even harder. They will have to find more new advantage.

On Saturday, June 6, 2020, 05:19:03 PM PDT, Punk-Stasi 2.0 wrote: On Sat, 6 Jun 2020 23:48:00 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:

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Our society has seen a history that the existence of recorded video provides evidence against wrong-doers. 

LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job. It's too bad you cannot figure out what other people can.  Yes, it is certainly correct to point out that a given technology can probably be employed both to help and hurt freedom, but that's only relevant if you only approach the question qualitatively, not quantitatively.  Yes, a camera can be used by a cop to photograph a perp, or by a citizen to photograph a cop.  But is that merely the only relevant issue?  I don't think so.  They don't cancel themselves out, if you factor in the number of incidents that might be photographed.   Let's consider Milwaukee, and George Floyd.  About 9 minutes of video, probably taken by a smartphone costing a few hundred dollars, indirectly led to hundreds of thousands of people protesting, and even rioting, around the world.  Probably even millions, if you include the foreign events.    Now, I'd be the first to say that's not an entirely unalloyed benefit (if you include the rioting and looting), but the public clearly needed to see that incident.  And they did so, because of the invention of the smarphone.  (The public saw the Rodney King incident in 1992, but only because somebody who was on a balcony at just the right time happened to have a camcorder, with a charged battery, and findable-in-time casette of videotape.)   But the public probably needs to see hundreds, or even thousands of similar incidents, but they don't, and that's mostly because it's mostly just random chance that a camera would be pointed in the right direction at the right time.   However, the technology mostly already exists to allow people to take a continuous, 360-degree panorama of a protest.  Will it see misconduct by rioters, even looters?  Sure.  But it will also show misconduct by cops, of a kind and extent that most protestors will want to see photographed.   I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.                     Jim Bell

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LMAO. Keep preaching surveillance technofascism Jim, you're doing a great job.

It's too bad you cannot figure out what other people can. Yes, it is certainly correct to point out that a given technology can probably be employed both to help and hurt freedom, but that's only relevant if you only approach the question qualitatively, not quantitatively. Yes, a camera can be used by a cop to photograph a perp, or by a citizen to photograph a cop. But is that merely the only relevant issue? I don't think so. They don't cancel themselves out, if you factor in the number of incidents that might be photographed.

But the public probably needs to see hundreds, or even thousands of similar incidents, but they don't, and that's mostly because it's mostly just random chance that a camera would be pointed in the right direction at the right time. However, the technology mostly already exists to allow people to take a continuous, 360-degree panorama of a protest. Will it see misconduct by rioters, even looters? Sure. But it will also show misconduct by cops, of a kind and extent that most protestors will want to see photographed.

I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.

All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources. marcos

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I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.

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All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources.

I think you need to explain that. So far, it makes no sense to me. And the "amplify the good and the bad equally" is misleading, because that clearly ignores the size of the 'sides' in the issue.

Yes, but there's always a loophole, just like Godel said. And the same technology that is used against one side can be used to infiltrate and surveil them. The size of who uses it doesn't matter that much with regard to infotech, because infotech amplifies the BRAIN of the wielder, whereas miltech amplifies the WILL. And we all know who has the bigger brain. \0xD

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 04:28:00PM -0500, \0xDynamite wrote:

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I suggest that most protestors will welcome this kind of technology.

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All technology is a liability if there are no leaders. They amplify the good and the bad equally. Unless there are leaders. Until then they consume resources.

I think you need to explain that. So far, it makes no sense to me. And the "amplify the good and the bad equally" is misleading, because that clearly ignores the size of the 'sides' in the issue.

Yes, but there's always a loophole, just like Godel said. And the same technology that is used against one side can be used to infiltrate and surveil them. The size of who uses it doesn't matter that much with regard to infotech, because infotech amplifies the BRAIN of the wielder, whereas miltech amplifies the WILL.

Dang - dat be true ya mangey muffaluggerah :) Tanks for tha thought,

And we all know who has the bigger brain.

\0xD

On Tue, Oct 02, 2018 at 11:41:25PM -0300, Juan wrote:

TDS Zenaan

Oh my! <blush> Why thank you, Juan :) (Such dignity you'll simply -never- flick the "Juesus Christ" image now :)

"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one.  It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working.  I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.  Have you started any projects?" I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then.  Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly:  The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques. I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter.  In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer    http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Comp...    I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time! Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped.  My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious.  I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM.  https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html    In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.    In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10.  The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk.   http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html       http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm    In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights.   Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto:   "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!". HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX: I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface.  It will include connectors to: 1.   USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone.2.   To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras.   (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.)3.   To a battery pack.4.   To a SSD.      At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour.  So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.   The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.   It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely.  I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected.  One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected.  If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.   The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely:  The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.   This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews.  I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected.  It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.   Jim Bell On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl wrote: It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box. I am interesting in participating in designing and building one.  It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working.  I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects? I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers).  openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money. I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 . I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people.  Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially. Am I on the same page as you? On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell wrote: A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds.  Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia.   In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened.  Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime.  It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder.  Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.   Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device:  A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage.  And a quick 911-call if necessary.  The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers.  And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator.    Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.  https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702     https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...    https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear...       https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html    https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough:  In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens.  Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow.  Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers?  Or if the wearer falls down?  Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc.  Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?   Can the data transfer be made economical?  Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day.  That's substantially greater than most people currently use.  One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes.  If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data.  Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval.  Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.             Jim Bell

Sounds reasonable for now.  Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Certainly.  The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape.  6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio.  With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time.  This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.   Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side? I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device.  Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone.  I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.   You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs.  Are you imagining designing a custom board?  I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary.   Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras?   I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.   I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon   Their most recent devices use 8-cores.  Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that.  Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.   PC board layout these days is rather easily done.  It shouldn't be a problem.  A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.   "Snapdragon is a suite of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores, an Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU), a Snapdragon wireless modem, a Hexagon Digital signal processor (DSP), a Qualcomm Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition and AI acceleration. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android, Windows Phone and netbooks.[1] They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products."    [end of quote]

It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely.  I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.

You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. Yes, that's possible.  As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters.  According to this,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi   , WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second.  18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second.  According to this,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G   4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second.  But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.  

The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected.  One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected.  If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.  

Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers?  https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org .  I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work.  Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol.  A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. Hey, I never was a 'software guy'.  This is well beyond my ability to choose.  But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.  

The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely:  The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.  

Sounds good for journalists working with a team.

This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews.  I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected.  It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.   Jim Bell

Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this.  I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion.  That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.

We should welcome all assistance.  If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas,     http://anarchovegas.com/      I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology.   I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU.  The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software.  I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.   Jim Bell On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl wrote: Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying. On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell wrote: "I am interesting in participating in designing and building one.  It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working.  I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.  Have you started any projects?" I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then.  Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly:  The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques. I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter.  In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.  I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child.  I was self and family taught, but mostly software. Single-board computer | | | | | | | | | | | Single-board computer Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f... | | |     Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers | | | | | | | | | | | Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin.... | | |     I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time! Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped.  My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious.  I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM.  MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com    In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.    | | | | | | | | | | | MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A. | | | In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10.  The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk.   the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | | | | | | | | | | the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | |        S100 Computers - SemiDisk History | | | | | | | | | | | S100 Computers - SemiDisk History S100 Computers | | |     You are very experienced with electronics. In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights.   Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto:   "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!". That sounds awesome. HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX: I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface.  It will include connectors to: 1.   USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone.2.   To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras.   (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.)3.   To a battery pack.4.   To a SSD.      At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour.  So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.   The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.   Sounds reasonable for now.  Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.  Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side? You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs.  Are you imagining designing a custom board?  I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely.  I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones. You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected.  One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected.  If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.   Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers?  https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org .  I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work.  Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol.  A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely:  The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.   Sounds good for journalists working with a team. This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews.  I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected.  It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.   Jim Bell Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this.  I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion.  That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible. On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl wrote: It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box. I am interesting in participating in designing and building one.  It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working.  I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects? I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers).  openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money. I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 . I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people.  Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially. Am I on the same page as you? On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell wrote: A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds.  Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia.   In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened.  Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime.  It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder.  Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.   Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device:  A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage.  And a quick 911-call if necessary.  The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers.  And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator.    Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.  https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702     https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...    https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear...       https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html    https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough:  In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens.  Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow.  Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers?  Or if the wearer falls down?  Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc.  Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?   Can the data transfer be made economical?  Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day.  That's substantially greater than most people currently use.  One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes.  If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data.  Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval.  Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.             Jim Bell

On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl wrote: On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell wrote:

Sounds reasonable for now.  Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Certainly.  The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape.  6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio.  With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time.  This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.

For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state.  Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.

I am proposing building a useful tool.  I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things".  Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur.   I look at it this way:  I am not proposing a major leap in technology.  Most of it already exists.   Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras.  WiFi and cell-phone data transmission.  What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices.  If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together? My answer to that is this:  Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time.  Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that!  People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available.  Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop?   And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!! Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance.  That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen.  The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?". Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"?  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect    Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see. (A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection.  While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken.  What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'.  Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well.  At extremely high resolution.  Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.) When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years.  And yes, that's a big matter.  But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'.   Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on.  There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors.  Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures.  Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4     The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot.  That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation.  Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time.  And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography.   I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what.  As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults.  A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity.   In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k   Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian).  Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative".  In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse.  Also:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM  If a person wearing a  Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure.  And that's exactly why we should welcome it.  

  Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?

I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device.  Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone.  I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.  

You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs.  Are you imagining designing a custom board?  I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary.   Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras?   I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.

My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way.  I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.

Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better.  See this, which is over 7 years old! http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual.... "During its demonstration, Qualcomm showed that the Snapdragon 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013"           [end of quote]   I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors. 

I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design.  I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list. I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be.  However, at this moment, I am woefully  unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs.  And there is apparently a  lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st...    I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology:  Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box.  This allows future upgrades to 5G as well.   An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too.   What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one.   I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second.  .  Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second.  I think.  And I also discovered   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi  that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this.   The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.    

 >On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types.  Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion? If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices.    I found this:    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio  "2000s[edit] "The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a Texas Instruments TMS320C30 CMOS digital signal processor (DSP), along with several hundred integrated circuit chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of RF CMOS technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single mixed-signal system-on-a-chip, which Broadcom demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in 3G mobile phones.[9][10]    "

Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced  undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon   Their most recent devices use 8-cores.  Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that.  Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.   PC board layout these days is rather easily done.  It shouldn't be a problem.  A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.   "Snapdragon is a suite of system on a chip (SoC) semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit (CPU) uses the ARM RISC instruction set. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores, an Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU), a Snapdragon wireless modem, a Hexagon Digital signal processor (DSP), a Qualcomm Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition and AI acceleration. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android, Windows Phone and netbooks.[1] They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products."    [end of quote] It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely.  I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.

You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. Yes, that's possible.  As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters.  According to this,   Wi-Fi

| | | | | | | | | | | Wi-Fi Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh... | | |    , WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second.  18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second.  According to this,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G   4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second.  But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.   The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion.  It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it.  It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected.  One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected.  If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.  

Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers?  https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org .  I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work.  Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol.  A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. Hey, I never was a 'software guy'.  This is well beyond my ability to choose.  But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.  

Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this? What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?

This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews.  I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected.  It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.   Jim Bell

Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this.  I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion.  That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.

We should welcome all assistance.  If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas,     http://anarchovegas.com/    

Thank you.  It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare.  That's inspiring.

I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer.  I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it.    I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology.   I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU.  The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software.  I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.  

It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup.  Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere.  It seems strange to not have people mention this. Karl An old saying:  "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done".Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things.  I'm trying to return to that era.  

Jim Bell On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl wrote: Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying. On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell wrote: "I am interesting in participating in designing and building one.  It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working.  I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.  Have you started any projects?" I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then.  Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly:  The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques. I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter.  In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.  I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child.  I was self and family taught, but mostly software. Single-board computer | | | | | | | | | | | Single-board computer Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f... | | |     Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers | | | | | | | | | | | Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin.... | | |     I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time! Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped.  My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious.  I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM.  MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com    In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.    | | | | | | | | | | | MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A. | | | In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10.  The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk.   the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | | | | | | | | | | the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com | | |        S100 Computers - SemiDisk History | | | | | | | | | | | S100 Computers - SemiDisk History S100 Computers | | |     You are very experienced with electronics. In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights.   Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto:   "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!". That sounds awesome. HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX: I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface.  It will include connectors to: 1.   USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone.2.   To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras.   (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.)3.   To a battery pack.4.   To a SSD.      At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour.  So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.   The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.   Sounds reasonable for now.  Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.  Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side? You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs.  Are you imagining designing a custom board?  I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people. It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely.  I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones. You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter. The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected.  One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected.  If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.   Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers?  https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org .  I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work.  Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol.  A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups. The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely:  The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.   Sounds good for journalists working with a team. This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews.  I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected.  It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.   Jim Bell Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this.  I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion.  That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible. On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl wrote: It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box. I am interesting in participating in designing and building one.  It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working.  I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects? I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers).  openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money. I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 . I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people.  Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially. Am I on the same page as you? On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell wrote: A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds.  Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia.   In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened.  Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime.  It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder.  Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.   Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device:  A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage.  And a quick 911-call if necessary.  The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers.  And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator.    Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.  https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702     https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...    https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear...       https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html    https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/ However, storage is not enough:  In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens.  Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow.  Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers?  Or if the wearer falls down?  Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc.  Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?   Can the data transfer be made economical?  Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day.  That's substantially greater than most people currently use.  One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes.  If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data.  Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval.  Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.             Jim Bell

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 8:20 AM other.arkitech wrote:

I've been very busy and there's a log going on here that i missed, but in general I am very interested in this project as well (together with the tor-replacement one),

Isn't it like those google-maps cars that are using a rotating camera to capture 360deg pics while in motion? Which brings the idea of using a single rotating minicamera instead of 8 or so. .

Since I am doing this USPS thing which consists on basically a personal negociator-box/electronic-you siting at home managing all of your private data I cannot avoid to think about using it as the final storage of the data coming from the portable device.

Would you be excited about contributing open source code to a pluggable storage backend, so that USPS could be used for storage? Open source is pretty import, and so is using existing work like USPS, so I'm imagining a pluggable backend.

best, OA

Sent with ProtonMail https://protonmail.com Secure Email.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Friday, June 12, 2020 9:49 PM, jim bell wrote:

On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl wrote:

On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell wrote:

...

Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.

Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.

...

For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.

I am proposing building a useful tool. I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things". Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur.

I look at it this way: I am not proposing a major leap in technology. Most of it already exists. Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras. WiFi and cell-phone data transmission. What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices. If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together?

My answer to that is this: Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time. Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that! People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available. Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop? And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!!

Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance. That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen. The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?".

Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see.

(A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection. While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken. What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'. Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well. At extremely high resolution. Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.)

When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years. And yes, that's a big matter. But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'.

Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on. There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors. Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4

The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot. That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation. Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time. And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography.

I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what. As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults. A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity.

In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian). Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative". In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM

If a person wearing a Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure. And that's exactly why we should welcome it.

...

Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?

I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.

...

You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.

Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.

...

My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.

Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better. See this, which is over 7 years old!

http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual....

"During its demonstration, *Qualcomm* showed that the *Snapdragon* 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013" [end of quote]

I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.

...

I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list.

I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be. However, at this moment, I am woefully unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs. And there is apparently a lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st...

I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology: Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box. This allows future upgrades to 5G as well. An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too. What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one.

I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second. . Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second. I think. And I also discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this.

The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.

...

On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion?

If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices. I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio

"2000s[edit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software-defined_radio&action=edit§ion=7 ]

"The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a Texas Instruments TMS320C30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320 CMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS digital signal processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor (DSP), along with several hundred integrated circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of RF CMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_CMOS technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single mixed-signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-signal system-on-a-chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip, which Broadcom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in 3G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G mobile phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones.[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-9[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-10 "

...

Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon

Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.

PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.

*"Snapdragon* is a suite of system on a chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip (SoC) semiconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit (CPU) uses the ARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture RISC instruction set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_instruction_set. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_core, an Adreno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno graphics processing unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit (GPU), a Snapdragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_LTE_modem wireless modem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_modem, a Hexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon Digital signal processor (DSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor, a Qualcomm Spectra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_positioning_system (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition and AI acceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_accelerator. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system), Windows Phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone and netbooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon#cite_note-1 They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]

It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.

...

You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.

Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, Wi-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh...

, WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.

The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working.

The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.

...

Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.

Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.

...

Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this?

What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?

This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.

Jim Bell

...

Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.

We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/

...

Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring.

I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer. I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it.

I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.

...

It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this.

...

Karl

An old saying: "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done". Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things. I'm trying to return to that era.

Jim Bell

On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl wrote:

Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell wrote:

"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"

I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.

I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.

I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software.

Single-board computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer

Single-board computer

Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f...

Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Comp...

Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers

This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin....

I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!

Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.

MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com

MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A.

In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html

the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com

S100 Computers - SemiDisk History http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm

S100 Computers - SemiDisk History

S100 Computers

You are very experienced with electronics.

In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".

That sounds awesome.

HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:

I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:

1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.

The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.

Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?

You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.

It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.

You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.

The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.

Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.

The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.

Sounds good for journalists working with a team.

This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.

Jim Bell

Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.

On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl wrote:

It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.

I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.

Have you started any projects?

I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.

I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .

I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.

Am I on the same page as you?

On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell wrote:

A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.

Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.

https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/

However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?

Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.

Jim Bell

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020, 12:36 PM other.arkitech wrote:

Would you be excited about contributing open source code to a pluggable storage backend, so that USPS could be used for storage?

Open source is pretty import, and so is using existing work like USPS, so I'm imagining a pluggable backend.

Yes, indeed Karl, it is only about when I am ready to unleash it, I am getting good investment leads for USPS, as soon as one of them materializes in the right terms (one of the terms is that the codebase they invest in MUST be GPL, and other is that the Governance of the system must be anonymous, skilled with proof and distributed) Until that happens I must stick with the terms of my current investor, which requires not to opensource it yet. In my idea the node would not only be a nmere storage, but instead it would behave as a negociator of your private data, so that one would be able to control the distribution, monetization, or whatever trade you'd like to do with it, including obviously not doing any trade at all with depending which data.

Sure, regarding the public project PBB, I'm personally interested in discussing solutions that are open source now. We need to work on design and code to meet any raised concerns, and if you are the only person who can do that for now it makes the process look incredibly inefficient. It also offers poor trust and verifiability. There are also a lot of existing systems out there that may be more suited for different parts, but could likely be integrated with USPS to get the best of both goals. Once USPS is open source it could be easily integrated if somebody already built a pluggable interface in an open source system that it would fit into. This is why I say it could be to your benefit to contribute even if you cannot open source your older work yet: you could influence the codebase to facilitate that later. But of course I am simply looking to start software design alongside others early.

Sent with ProtonMail https://protonmail.com Secure Email.

...

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Friday, June 12, 2020 9:49 PM, jim bell wrote:

On Friday, June 12, 2020, 03:27:06 AM PDT, Karl wrote:

On Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 12:00 AM jim bell wrote:

...

Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable.

Certainly. The number of cameras is somewhat arbitrary, the main feature desired is an arrangement that can record the entire 360 degree horizontal landscape. 6 cameras should be sufficient with the (older) 4x3 screen aspect ratio. With the modern HD's 16 x 9 ratio, it's conceivable that a 4 camera system would be sufficient, and probably 5 cameras. The compression hardware allowing for as many as 6 cameras should be more than plenty, and there would not be any need to have all cameras installed at any given time. This same system could also be used to run a fixed system, perhaps mounted on a high location.

...

For full transparency, when you describe a lot more recording than most people do on their phones (like mounting 360 video on a high location without specifying that it is confined to private property, or in an area where people have asked for it, or is publicizing its recordings), I start feeling scared because I'm reminded of the current surveillance state. Just so you know, because others might have that response too occasionally.

I am proposing building a useful tool. I don't work under the illusion that it is possible to always prevent "bad people" from using that tool for "bad things". Nevertheless, I am quite confident that given the large number of applications of this tool, an enormous net benefit to people will occur.

I look at it this way: I am not proposing a major leap in technology. Most of it already exists. Smartphones, SSD's, battery packs, and cameras. WiFi and cell-phone data transmission. What I'm proposing could be readily done with existing chips and devices. If "cops" (term used generically) actually WANTED a 360-panorama video recording system, for recording demonstrations or riots, don't you think somebody would have already put this together?

My answer to that is this: Cops DON'T want their 'standard of performance' to be raised in ways they don't want to see, all the time. Sure, they'd no doubt love in very limited cases to use such a device to provide evidence against a few defendants, but they know it wouldn't stay limited to that! People would start to EXPECT that every 10th cop would have this kind of device, with the video eventually made publicly available. Or "worse", to them, how about EVERY cop? And all that video would have to be made available to every defense attorney, in every trial !!!

Already, many and perhaps most jurisdictions have cop-body-cams, which I consider an enormous advance. That is, it's an advance IF the cops are REQUIRED to wear the cameras, and even more importantly, they are not allowed to push some sort of "reset and erase data" button if they've just murdered a citizen. The issue isn't so much "surveillance", but "who controls and benefits from that surveillance?".

Have you ever heard of the "CSI effect"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect Future jurors exposed to technology begin to expect that technology to be used in just about every case, not just the few that cops and prosecutors would like to see.

(A few years ago, I saw a show on an advance in evidence collection. While photography has long been used in collecting crime-scene evidence, the problem is, it isn't immediately clear what photographs have to be taken. What was being described amounted to a 'photograph robot', a device which drives through a crime scene (indoors or out) and photographs 'everything'. Not merely in the 360 degree horizontal plane, but in fact "up" and "down" as well. At extremely high resolution. Unfortunately, a few minutes of searching YouTube, I cannot find an appropriate video.)

When we think of 'reasons that cops have to fear video surveillance', perhaps we mostly think of incidents like Rodney King in 1992, George Floyd in 2020, and a few other incidents over the years. And yes, that's a big matter. But I think there is also a class of surveillance that would show cops in a bad light, even when they are seemingly doing 'nothing'.

Portland Oregon, a city a few miles away from me, is actually somewhat famous for a series of skirmishes that go on. There is a repeated suspicion that the leftist government of Portland orders its cops to turn away when there is a disturbance by leftist protestors. Occasionally, organizations like Patriot Prayer announces a rally, and shortly afterwards Antifa shows up, and a riot ensures. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fECgG5NLUr4

The Portland Police, operating under the leftist Portland government, have frequently been accused of following orders to allow Antifa to riot. That might be true, but it's hard to collect evidence supporting (or opposing) such an accusation. Most publicly-accessible evidence is limited to reporting and broadcasts by news media, and there are few such news crews, and their cameras only point in one direction at a time. And they choose, if for no other reason than the lack of broadcast time, to air only a limited portion of their photography.

I've seen some broadcasts, and given these major limitations (and major cuts) it is very difficult to figure out who is actually doing what. As importantly, it isn't clear if (for example) the cops are accidentally-on-purpose FAILING to respond to assaults. A few seconds of an assault, with a cop somewhere in the background, might not unambiguously show the kind of deliberate negligence that would resolve the ambiguity.

In one rather-well publicized example, gay conservative journalist Andy Ngo was violently assaulted by Antifa-types about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k Naturally, he wasn't assaulted because he is gay; nor was he assaulted because he was a minority (Asian). Apparently he was simply assaulted because he is called "conservative". In this day and age, that is enough to merit a cracked skull or even worse. Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwT3PoRErM

If a person wearing a Personal Black Box had been around, many minutes before, during, and after this kind of assault, I think it would have been far more clear who was complicit in the events. I have no doubt that cops fear that kind of exposure. And that's exactly why we should welcome it.

...

Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?

I think the App running on the smartphone device will control the rest of the device. Most of the processing (video compression) should be done by the central board, not by the smartphone. I think the smartphone would be able to run anything you ordinarily would want to run, such as telephone service.

...

You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.

Yes, I think that a custom board will be very desireable, and probably necessary. Is it possible that an existing design compresses the output of 6 HD video cameras? I haven't looked, but it seems unlikely.

...

My experience with consumer single board computers was that you have to drop the quality very low or use multiple boards in a pluggable way. I value seeing from multiple angles more than seeing in all directions, myself, but it seems needed no matter how it functions.

Fortunately, existing technology (or technology that can be readily assembled) could do so much better. See this, which is over 7 years old!

http://itersnews.com/?p=24633#:~:text=During%20its%20demonstration%2C%20Qual....

"During its demonstration, *Qualcomm* showed that the *Snapdragon* 800 chipset compressed 1080p 30 frame video clips at a bit rate of 4Mbps using its built-in HEVC codec software stack. On the other hand, the predecessor H. 264 video codec technology encoded the same 1080p 30 frame at far higher bit rate of 6Mbps.Feb 13, 2013" [end of quote]

I've just started looking at the Qualcomm Snapdragon series of microprocessors.

...

I understand you are beginning to prepare a board design. I mostly know software nowadays so I'll leave the chip review to the rest of the list.

I am now simply anticipating what such a 'central board' would contain, and how big it will be. However, at this moment, I am woefully unaware of the history of smartphone CPUs. And there is apparently a lot to learn, see this example: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/12/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-865-is-a-st...

I am trying to keep the added-technology things a simplified great deal, using mostly existing technology: Using a smartphone as a controller and a communications (WiFi, cell phone data) box. This allows future upgrades to 5G as well. An existing SSD, an existing battery back, too. What I've become aware of, literally in the last two days, is how much functionality is in a modern smart-phone, especially a 5G one.

I calculated that the as-compressed output of 6 HD cameras could be 40 megabits/second, but from the cite above even 7-year-old technology compressed a 1080P, 30 frames per second vide at 4 megabytes/second. . Even a 4G phone will be able to transfer that data rate, 4 x 6 cameras, or 24 megabytes per second. I think. And I also discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi that WiFi 4 and above has a high-enough link rate to accomodate this.

The two main things that must be designed are the camera stack and the video-compression central board.

...

On the software end of hardware freedom, I'm aware of a need for common hardware that has good support for software defined radio, especially with multiple receivers and antenna types. Do you have any interest in including possible radio logging in the system maybe as a plan for eventual expansion?

If the video-compressing central board is as uncrowded as I anticipate (perhaps two, multi-core CPUS, maybe Snapdragons?), there will probably be a lot of extra room available for an SDR, and other devices. I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio

"2000s[edit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Software-defined_radio&action=edit§ion=7 ]

"The SpeakEasy SDR system in the 1994 uses a Texas Instruments TMS320C30 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TMS320 CMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMOS digital signal processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor (DSP), along with several hundred integrated circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit chips, with the radio filling the back of a truck. By the late 2000s, the emergence of RF CMOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_CMOS technology made it practical to scale down an entire SDR system onto a single mixed-signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-signal system-on-a-chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System-on-a-chip, which Broadcom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom demonstrated with the BCM21551 processor in 2007. The Broadcom BCM21551 has practical commercial applications, for use in 3G https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G mobile phones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones.[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-9[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio#cite_note-10 "

...

Radio logging might further expand to drone tracking, planted device detection, etc; and would stimulate better emissions control and reduced undiscussed wireless communication in response, which helps privacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon

Their most recent devices use 8-cores. Perhaps that will handle the compression of 3 HD video devices, but I don't expect to rely on that. Three, or possibly two such physical CPUs (with few other responsibilities) will probably easily handle 6 HDTV cameras.

PC board layout these days is rather easily done. It shouldn't be a problem. A six-layer PCB, with components on both sides of the board, should be more than sufficient.

*"Snapdragon* is a suite of system on a chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_on_a_chip (SoC) semiconductor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor products for mobile devices designed and marketed by Qualcomm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm Technologies Inc. The Snapdragon central processing unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_processing_unit (CPU) uses the ARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture RISC instruction set https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_instruction_set. A single SoC may include multiple CPU cores https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_core, an Adreno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno graphics processing unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit (GPU), a Snapdragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon_LTE_modem wireless modem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_modem, a Hexagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Hexagon Digital signal processor (DSP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signal_processor, a Qualcomm Spectra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Spectra Image Signal Processor (ISP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processor and other software and hardware to support a smartphone's global positioning system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_positioning_system (GPS), camera, video, audio, gesture recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition and AI acceleration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_accelerator. As such, Qualcomm often refers to the Snapdragon as a "mobile platform" (e.g., Snapdragon 865 5G Mobile Platform). Snapdragon semiconductors are embedded in devices of various systems, including Android https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system), Windows Phone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone and netbooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Snapdragon#cite_note-1 They are also used in cars, wearable devices and other devices. In addition to the processors, the Snapdragon line includes modems, wi-fi chips and mobile charging products." [end of quote]

It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.

...

You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.

Yes, that's possible. As with many things, there will always be a trade-off in these matters. According to this, Wi-Fi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi (/ˈwaɪfaɪ/)[1] is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, wh...

, WiFi 6 has a link rate of between 600-9608 megabits/second. 18 gigabytes per hour (what I calculated as 3 gigabyte/camera/hour, with 6 cameras) is 40 megabits/second. According to this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G 4G was/is supposed to handle as much as 1 Gbit/second. But in a crowd of smartphone-users, what this will translate to 'in real life' is questionable.

The streaming system should be able to respond to requests to reduce upload rate during congestion. It might be good to provide a way for a user to say when or where something important is happening, so the software could prioritize it. It could also be good to be able to look at streams to verify they are working.

The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.

...

Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.

Hey, I never was a 'software guy'. This is well beyond my ability to choose. But one advantage of implementing a WiFi transmission is that there may be less competition for data transfer during a protest/demonstration in the WiFi bands, rather than cell-phone data bands.

...

Any idea how I might connect with other software people around this?

What about doing a Google search for "snapdragon programmer" or "smartphone programmer" ?

This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.

Jim Bell

...

Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.

We should welcome all assistance. If things seem to be coming along, I will probably announce this as a project about July 19 2020 at Las Vegas, http://anarchovegas.com/

...

Thank you. It's looking unlikely for now that I'll be able to make it to that event, but congratulations on keeping it held despite the pandemic scare. That's inspiring.

I am merely going to be an invited speaker, not an organizer. I want to be able to show how technology can be used to assist freedom, rather than to oppose it.

I believe that one theme of the event is development of technology. I'd also like to be able to announce a project of a replacement/competition for the TOR anonymization system, perhaps using a Raspberry Pi 4 CPU. The main obstacle to that at this point is finding somebody who would commit to write the appropriate software. I will probably announce both as projects, and see what kind of support we get.

...

It's the other topic, but there have been a lot of software attempts to replace or augment Tor that likely one could contact or even bring back to life for a project for a dedicated setup. Somebody may even have compiled a list of those somewhere. It seems strange to not have people mention this.

...

Karl

An old saying: "After everything is said and done, a lot more gets said than done". Cypherpunks are (or, at least, were) supposed to actually be able to accomplish things. I'm trying to return to that era.

Jim Bell

On Thursday, June 11, 2020, 02:31:06 PM PDT, Karl wrote:

Jim, I'm reading your e-mail while replying.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020, 4:43 PM jim bell wrote:

"I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said. Have you started any projects?"

I've done a substantial amount of electronics in the 1970's and to the early 1990's, but I haven't done an electronics project since then. Not that I couldn't pick it up quickly: The major thing I'm missing is knowledge of the current set of devices available and construction techniques.

I designed and built a constant-temperature bath in the ealry 1970's, also a 4-digit audio frequency counter, also a 4.5 digit digital voltmeter. In 1977 I built a "Dyna-Micro" microprocessor trainer, from the design in Radio-Electronics magazine.

I was born in 83 and I believe I built a robot hand by following a design in Radio-Electronics as a child. I was self and family taught, but mostly software.

Single-board computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-board_computer

Single-board computer

Unlike a desktop personal computer, single board computers often do not rely on expansion slots for peripheral f...

Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?57918-Dyna-Micro-Single-Board-Comp...

Dyna-Micro Single Board Computers

This is a discussion forum about vintage computer collecting, use, restoration and display powered by vBulletin....

I added to that with a custom-PC board with 8K by 8 memory, which actually seemed like a lot of memory at that time!

Starting in 1978, I designed and built my custom-bus Z-80 microprocessor computer which at one point had about 600 IC's, mostly wire-wrapped. My father and I set up the ability to make 2-sided PC boards around 1972, but since we couldn't plate-through the holes, actually assembling such a board was a bit tedious. I built two 32K by 8 DRAM cards using Motorola 4k x 1 6605 DRAM chips, later replacing them with static RAM. MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com https://datasheetspdf.com/datasheet/MCM6605A.html In hindsight, I decided that I should have used one of the 16k x 1 DRAMs that had become available.

MCM6605A Datasheet | Motorola Semiconductor - Datasheetspdf.com

MCM6605A 4096-Bit DRAM datasheet pdf provided by Datasheetspdf.com Datasheet pdf Search for MCM6605A.

In 1980, I invented the solid-state disk, I called it a "SemiDisk", and in late 1981 I started a company which built them for 10 years, for the S-100 bus, the TRS-80 Model II, the IBM PC, and the Epson QX-10. The first three started as 512k byte cards, with software that implemented a virtual disk. the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com http://www.storagesearch.com/consumer-ssd.html

the consumer SSD guide on StorageSearch.com

S100 Computers - SemiDisk History http://www.s100computers.com/Hardware%20Folder/SemiDisk/History/History.htm

S100 Computers - SemiDisk History

S100 Computers

You are very experienced with electronics.

In 1990, I designed and built a device which used 76 IRLEDS to flash, activating the Opticom traffic control system to turn red traffic lights into green traffic lights. Had I gone into major production, I would have used as its motto: "It's the most fun you can have in a moving car !!!".

That sounds awesome.

HOW I FORESEE THE PERSONAL BLACK BOX:

I see a central box, about the size and shape of a common smartphone, but with no user interface. It will include connectors to:

1. USB, to a standard, commercial smartphone. 2. To the camera stack, 4-6 HD cameras. (About 3 gigabytes per hour per camera.) 3. To a battery pack. 4. To a SSD. At 3 gigabytes/camera/hour x 6 cameras, about 18 gigabytes per hour. So, a 1 terabyte SSD should be sufficient, if its data transfer rate is enough.

The central box will probably include 2-3 multi-core microprocessors, and its main task will be taking the data outputs of the cameras, compressing them, and sending the result to the SSD.

Sounds reasonable for now. Thinking of making the number of cameras customizable. Any thoughts on supporting a standalone phone app, on the software side?

You mentioned a lot of experience making new hardware designs. Are you imagining designing a custom board? I imagine that would open options up a lot but it sounds like a big investment of effort and time for most people.

It will probably not be possible to send more than a tiny fraction of this data directly to the Internet, so I anticipate sending maybe 1 frame/second for each camera, to be stored remotely. I've read that eventually, 5G technology will be able to transfer 10 gigabits/second, but I doubt that this will be kept up in a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom will be using their own cell phones.

You can also compress it super-low quality when quick motions matter.

The smartphone might also be linked to a nearby confederate (is that word too anti-PC these days?) by WiFi, whose system might mirror as best as possible the video material being collected. One goal is to ensure that complete destruction of the system will not lose all the data collected. If the location of the event was anticipated, perhaps a remote data-collection box could be installed, which would act as a safe data backup.

Any thoughts on a data protocol with wifi peers? https://datproject.org https://gnunet.org . I've also found https://git-annex.branchable.com which uses git of course https://scuttlebutt.nz which is nodejs and json based but has nice data preservation goals, a modified blockchain might work. Haven uses the signal private messenger protocol. A local webserver could do a simple handmade one, I suppose; harder to make many backups.

The actual control of the camera system might be done remotely: The person wearing the system shouldn't be expected to do anything other than being a camera platform.

Sounds good for journalists working with a team.

This kind of system would probably have an even bigger market to journalists and news crews. I don't expect it to substitute for traditional video cameras, but its presence would tend to guarantee that most information gets collected. It would tend to protect the news crews, because it would store a record of any attacks on them.

Jim Bell

Sorry I jumped excitedly on your project like this. I can do some software coding but need to work with others to take something to completion. That difficulty is also why I think of reusing existing work where possible.

On Wednesday, June 10, 2020, 12:26:08 AM PDT, Karl wrote:

It's obvious that people who are oppressed by local authorities need a personal black box.

I am interesting in participating in designing and building one. It helps me to set a norm of speaking concisely and to the point, as reading can be hard for me when working. I am sorry if I have skimmed over something already said.

Have you started any projects?

I have started https://github.com/xloem/openrealrecord (nodejs, messy) and https://github.com/xloem/libgame/blob/wip-1/source/stream-up.cpp (c++ livestreams data to sia skynet with hash identifiers). openrealrecord has an open bountysource.com bounty of I think a little over $1000 that a contributor never claimed, left over from back when I had money.

I also started developing videorecording in guardianproject's haven app towards this goal https://github.com/guardianproject/haven/pull/418 .

I'd like to build this in a way that quickly gets it usable by average people. Once it is easy to use and stable the people who can make the most use of it can share it among each other and more developers may contribute exponentially.

Am I on the same page as you?

On Mon, Oct 1, 2018, 2:16 AM jim bell wrote:

A few weeks ago, I got done binge-watching every episode of NCIS, and am now up to Season 4 of Criminal Minds. Naturally, this induces a bit of what I'll call cinematic paranoia. In what seems to be a majority of episodes, a victim gets attacked, usually ends up dead, and the plucky investigators are stuck trying to figure out what happened. Naturally, they usually do, but only after about 45 minutes of high-tension showtime. It occurs to me that what people may need, for physical security, would be what might be called a "personal black box", analogous to an airplane flight recorder. Or, a civilian version of a cop's body-cam.

Any modern smartphone would have the basics of such a device: A high-resolution camera, microphone, and a huge amount of storage. And a quick 911-call if necessary. The mere possession and use of such a device would probably deter the large majority of potential attackers. And even if it does not completely protect a given user, it would allow far more easy identification of the perpetrator. Parts of this, of course, are not a new idea.

https://www.sparkfun.com/news/702

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/your-own...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fitbit-activity-data-as-evidence-in-court-wear... https://www.medgadget.com/2005/08/cpod_a_personal.html https://newatlas.com/australia-black-box-flight-recorder-soldiers/51267/

However, storage is not enough: In use, in some instances, an attacker would presumably be aware enough to take or break the device, so some sort of continuous or discontinuous upload of the data could be done, to be available no matter what else happens. Say, a frame per second when nothing seems to be happening, and a greater rate when triggered somehow. Could a heart-rate monitor be employed, sensed one axis of the phone's accelerometers? Or if the wearer falls down? Or if a sufficiently-loud noise is heard, etc. Or if a trigger-word is spoken a la Siri?

Can the data transfer be made economical? Even an average of 1 megabit/second would be over one gigabyte during a 3 hour usage per day. That's substantially greater than most people currently use. One possibility is that the phone could upload the data to the cell phone company, where it could be "parked" for a few seconds or minutes. If nothing happens to the phone to cause a trigger (some sort of attack) the phone could instruct the cell phone company to abandon the data. Conversely, if a trigger occurs, the cell phone company would move 100% of the data to a backup system for later retrieval. Presumably, the cell phone company would offer discounted rates for such transfers, and only offer that service if the local service is sufficiently unloaded at that moment.

Jim Bell

On Sun, 14 Jun 2020 16:35:50 +0000 "other.arkitech" wrote:

The same system can serve as the anonymization overlay we talked about in another thread. All the aspects of a sybil controlled mesh arrangement of nodes are already working fine. With the inclusion of chaff traffic, which fits seamlessly in the design, and introducing a technque to hide originators and receptors (e.g. onion routing) it would be sorted out.

I don't think those two 'features' are exactly easy to implement. If your network is an actual mesh, then routing, even the ordinary kind, isn't exactly easy either?

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Sunday, June 21, 2020 3:10 AM, grarpamp wrote: ...

https://www.pervices.com/

the Cyan is more than 1BTC, but still worth every Satoshi! :P~ https://www.pervices.com/documentation-cyan - 1GHz and 3GHz instantaneous bandwidth options - 4x 40Gbps QSFP+ - Intel Stratix 10 FPGA SoC - 10MHz, 10ppb, reference OCXO - Direct conversion quadrature transceiver - Deterministic phase coherency and latency [read: beam forming / steering :) ] - Over 16GHz RF bandwidth* - 16 bit, 1 GSPS DAC on each transmit chain** - 16 bit, 1 GSPS ADC on each receive chain** best regards,

wonderful quality, but the data-storage and data-transmission systems need to be kept proportionally larger.

Rental video tapes were acceptable quality too, under 200k pixels. Today 4K (8.3M pix) at 10-bit per pixel color does not mean people need it. Maybe people trade color for good optic resolution or bandwidth reduction, etc. At least where such knobs can be made. In a situation, you don't get a timeout to swapout full cards, find better wifi hotspot peers, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi

WiFi has some specs on the tin, but speeds in real deployed practice is going to be less. Another example of available camera modules are inside security cameras... alibaba, ebay... many have numerous embedded compression levels, some TLS, ONVIF standard, ethernet power, WiFi/Cellular etc. All from China OEMs that can custom whatever people want for the right price. Backdoors free with all ClosedSource.

mutual-data-backups: Cameraman A B

Two person teams are fairly common in the journo/activism space. Any project would want to interview some wide ranges of potential customers to determine / propose what might actually be useful in a new product.

Are there apps/utilities which can measure useage/non-useage of WiFi at any given location?

Netstumbler or whatever other wifi tool is in fdroid repo.

that a 4K video can be compressed to 'about' 3 gigabytes/hour of data

People can compress any video source down to whatever, but they can no longer call it the first thing anymore, only what they compressed it down do. Lossless video compression exists, but isn't generally worth it. Youtube is a waste at 4k for stupid vlogs. But if you want to read a book at 100m, you need glass, aperture, resolution, stability. See customer needs.

that doesn't tell us how much CPU time is needed to do that in real-time. I am doing a google search for: '4k video compression real-time' but I haven't read more than a few results yet.

In software, the defacto opensource tool is ffmpeg.org. People can download a 4K test stream and chart different CPU's ability to handle different levels in realtime.

On Mon, 22 Jun 2020 23:50:47 +0000 (UTC) jim bell wrote:

https://www.thedailyfodder.com/2020/06/breaking-video-cops-caught-on-video.h...

Zach Wester, planted drugs on 120 su spects. Prosecutors backed him up all 120 times until bodycam footage revealed his dastardly deed.

so the cop was caught by a police camera? What kind of retard can believe that? Wait. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/10/former-jackson-county-d... "He also allegedly circumvented the Jackson County Sheriff's Office body camera policy and "tailored" his recordings to conceal his crimes," So, the cameras didn't prevent the turd from doing whatever the fuck he wanted. He got caught only because, being clearly insane, he didn't know when to stop. "The allegations prompted prosecutors in the town of Marianna to review nearly 300 cases in which Wester was involved. They ultimately dropped charges in nearly 120 cases" meaning, 180 people are still falsely charged.