woodman · HackerTrans

woodman

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hace 7 añosdiscuss

> Evidence of the NSAKEY being a backdoor includes some description of how the backdoor might work...

It would only work one way with an API relying on a PKI with a single CA, zero transparency, and trusted keys named after spy agencies suddenly appearing out of nowhere. I'm gonna bail here, because I'm now not sure if you honestly don't know what the CAPI was in relation to the NSAKEY - or if you're trying to waste my time by getting me to explain the most basic principles of public key infrastructure.

hace 7 añosdiscuss

> The entirety of the NSAKEY evidence is "it has NSA in the name."

Your comparison is out of line because of ridiculous characterizations like this. Microsoft said that it was a backup key, which either means that they have the most poorly implemented scheme for backing up cryptographic materials ever devised, or they don't mean what most people think when they hear the word "backup". Microsoft then claimed that the backup was necessary for passing the export control review, which is a bold lie to tell since the Export Administration Regulations are available for review to everybody. One thing not included in the EAR that might influence Microsoft's conduct in trying to get permission from the USG to reach global customers: executive orders. The government had a hard limit at 56-bits and was proposing that anybody wanting to export crypto beyond that needed to participate in their push for private-key escrow, which they were calling "key-recovery". Recovery... sounds kind of like a backup plan...

I provided links in my response to the parent comment.

hace 7 añosdiscuss

The demand for evidence in the wake of all the NSA leaks is laughable.[0] What does evidence of the NSAKEY being a backdoor look like to you, a provably malicious CSA shim, signed by the key, hand delivered by James Clapper?

I'll tell you what it looks like to me:

After the debug symbol is found, Microsoft gives a seemingly very stupid explanation for it[1]: "It is a backup key. Yeah, uhhhh... during the export control review - the NSA said that we had to have a backup key, so we named it after them..." After being challenged on the plausibility of their backup scheme they refuse to provide any further explanation.

Here is the funny part: Microsoft might be technically telling the truth about it being a "backup". Consider what else was going on around this period: ridiculous export controls on key-length, the clipper chip... and finally: government managed private-key escrow[2]. At that time the export regulations did not specify a backup requirement, and yet Microsoft claims otherwise. You know who else was talking a lot about backups? The Whitehouse, in its proposal for allowing the export of key-lengths above 56-bits - so long as applicants implement "key-recovery".[3] Somehow I don't think that we share the same definition of the word "backup".

Also, ECI Sentry Raven[4], have fun with that.

[0] https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/784280/sigint-ena...

[1] https://cryptome.org/nsakey-ms-dc.htm

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20000818204903/https://csrc.nist...

[3] https://epic.org/crypto/key_escrow/key_recovery.html

[4] https://archive.org/details/nsa-sentry-eagle-the-intercept-1...

hace 7 añosdiscuss

It was a debugging symbol that a Microsoft developer either negligently or heroically included in a public release... so that explains away the "nobody would be so stupid" argument. You are aware of how the Intel ME killswitch was located right? A commented xml file included with the flashing software helpfully informed anybody willing to look that a field was related to the NSA's High Assurance Platform program. This was after ten years of security researchers pointing at the fact that this was a backdoor. For whatever reason both Intel and the NSA were happy to let the public remain needlessly vulnerable all that time... But yeah, I'm just like one of those water fluoridation loons. The NSA wasn't at all hamfisted in the intentional weakening of elliptic curves and blatant RSA bribery, this isn't an obvious pattern emerging.

hace 7 añosdiscuss

> I'm sorry, but this seems a little naive.

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

I thought everybody already knew that US corporations serve as an extension to the surveillance apparatus. Remember all the corporations fighting against the government's mandate at an artificially crippled maximum keysize of 40 bits, in order to allow continued surveillance in the 90s? Yeah, neither do I.

hace 7 añosdiscuss

This is one of those situations that makes me wonder at how obvious the right way to go is, and how unlikely that is to happen. Offense/defense costs are not even close to being symmetrical, it is insane that the USG would advance the state of the art in electronic warfare - while not even pretending to try and match the effort in defense. This is why we abandoned our biological weapons program, we were effectively developing the technology for incredibly cheap weapons of mass destruction that any banana republic could mimic... not unlike the rootkit leaks.

hace 7 añosdiscuss

This, unfortunately, occurs so infrequently that it can safely be ignored by 99.9% of the economy. Businesses have really enjoyed having their cake and eating it too with the transition away from a highly involved acquisition process that generally resulted in a tailored solution that the USG owned, to the present COTS policy that allows them to then go on to sell software to people that have already effectively paid for it through taxes. While there was an impressive amount of bureaucracy and an infinitely self referential system of standards in the old method, it did lead to some pretty interesting side effects: Ada[0], IDEF[1], MIL-STD-498[2], etc.

The most recent liberation of useful taxpayer funded software that I can think of was over ten years ago, when NIST released NFIS2 - the fingerprint software that the FBI relied on. They of course had to be crappy about it and wrap it in export controls that limited its utility, but it was interesting to see all the work that internal development had done - very polished, with man pages going back to '97. Ah the memories: software classified as munitions, the clipper chip...

[0] http://archive.adaic.com/pol-hist/policy/naig94-1.txt

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEF#The_IDEF_modeling_languag...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIL-STD-498

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20041206072946/http://fingerprin...

hace 7 añosdiscuss

> > "If every investor..."

This is already a thing, and it is starting to look like an incredibly bad idea. Well over a year ago I had lunch with my financial advisor and he tried to sell me on a portfolio balanced on some kind of social responsibility metric (female board member ratio, carbon credits, etc). At the time I thought it was just a new way to separate morons from their money, but now I'm starting to think that the US markets are setting themselves up for a fungibility attack. I remember, many years ago, the debate on bitcoin tainting - keeping a register of illegally obtained coins (and leaf transactions) and refusing to accept them. That is obviously an attack on the utility of the currency - a unit of value.

So what is the metric here, what is the new unit of value? The best case outcome is a Tower of Babel pandemonium, worst case is an irreversible further consolidation of kingmaking power.

hace 7 añosdiscuss

Google "Richard Prince copyright". This is not a new issue, not even close.

BTW... She is using a still[0] from a video that CNN owns the copyright to, and section 3 of their tos[1] explicitly forbids doing what she is doing - with the unnecessarily stated exception "as otherwise expressly permitted under copyright law". You really want to take that exception away from her? I can pretty easily argue that her use is transformative, can you? How does this differ from what she is complaining about?

[0] http://www.erynnbrook.com/white-feelings-for-charlottesville... [1] https://www.cnn.com/terms

hace 7 añosdiscuss

ctrl+f 'transformative'... No matches.

I'm surprised by the sympathy I'm seeing for this position. You people know that she is effectively complaining about fair use, right? This is not something that can be budged on, even in deference to the feelings of a "writer/feminist/educator". Fair use is the only thing that stands between us and massive intellectual property cartels guiding the public consciousness through selective enforcement. Wanna go back to network television? Because this is how you do it.

hace 8 añosdiscuss

There is a good chance they subscribe to a blocklist, so you could be blocked by anyone of a thousand people. Image the old PGP web of trust, but for crafting perfect echo chambers. I wonder if anybody has ever done the math on that.

hace 8 añosdiscuss

The insane spike is for low traffic sites, so I'm guessing a blog platform defaulted RSS.

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Wow, to base such a lengthy article on a google trend search of "rss"...

Queue rekt.webm: https://trends.builtwith.com/feeds/RSS

hace 8 añosdiscuss

I'm curious, how are you defining "the like"? The list of people denied service looks a lot more like those you wouldn't want preceding your Coca-Cola ad buy. Why would Patreon care? Because payment networks care.

   8chan
   Encyclopedia Dramatica
   BitChute

If you expand the scope beyond Patreon and include Paypal then you can throw in:

   Wikileaks
   Numerous Antifa chapters
   World Socialist Web Site

As somebody who has been involved with bitcoin since 2012, I can tell you from first hand experience that when Visa declares you a persona non grata - a large number of businesses quickly do the same. Yes, the full list of Patreon service denials includes a lot of unsympathetic figures - but you'd be a fool to think that this behavior doesn't shift with the Overton window (welcome back to the world of crypto currency, Dwolla, betcha feel silly for screwing up that perfect opportunity Paypal gave you).

hace 8 añosdiscuss

I'd say the former, but it really doesn't matter - the point is the subjectivity of collective "good" and "correctness". Also, a lot of people are under the impression that these things are numerically based - the democratic tyranny of the majority... this is not the case. We see the same thing play out in the slow failure of competing interest to guard against lobbyist abuse, it is an issue of motivation - not quantity or legitimacy.

hace 8 añosdiscuss

One literally defines the other, so no. Unless you are speaking from a universal perspective, which unfortunately isn't really part of the collective consciousness - and therefor inconsequential to daily life and the issue at hand.

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Wallstreet. My financial advisor tried to sell me on this new socially conscious index, years ago. Political correctness is great for business - very predictable, very manageable.

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b14z9vvlscsnp2...

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Ouch, feeding probabilistic models training data scored with a gradient of truthfulness tags generated by humans and all their biases... surely this won't end horribly and simply serve as a method to algorithmically institute the tyranny of the majority.

If you really want to do this (You really don't, I assure you - you'll hate the end result), you've got to reach back through the AI winter and drag the granddaddy of NLP, propositional logic, into modern AI development. We'll see this employed by lawyers long before journalists.

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

hace 8 añosdiscuss

I think you're right about the lack of power being the biggest contributor to the problems we had - which remained even after they tried to reduce the feature set (emergency magazine-well, user selectable gas tube aperture).

I think it was a poor idea in the first place to push a beltfed machinegun down to the fireteam level. People generally have a misconception about what machineguns are for - while volume of fire certainly figures into effective suppression, accuracy is more important. An effectively employed machinegun should be treated like some kind of sniper shotgun, where you can put 50% of your shots into a vehicle sized target a mile away. You aren't going to be doing that while playing the I'm-up-he-sees-me-I'm-down game.

hace 8 añosdiscuss

Hopefully it gets better with time for you. My complaint wasn't with pain, but numbness. I developed this problem very early on, in SOI, and kept it to myself because I knew that it would get me medically discharged. Thankfully I never had to explain to anyone why I'd go to the lengths I did in order to avoid handling grenades. After 2 years of civilian life my knees and lower back stopped bothering me, but 15 years later: my hands still feel like they're falling asleep.