14 Mar
2013
14 Mar
'13
3:33 p.m.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
Oh hai!
NymRights is dedicated to making sure people can use the names they
choose on the Internet. This saturday at 2pm we're having a meeting at
sudo room. Among things we'll be discussing:
How the Phoenix IDESG plenary went
The NymRights "suggested policy" for names on websites
Reception of my Shmoocon talk
General name-related nuttery
It is open to all, please come if this is something that interests
you! http://www.nymrights.org for more info!
Cheers,
aestetix
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16 Mar
16 Mar
7:23 p.m.
New subject: NymRights
It seems to me that the issues around "freedom of name" come down to:
a) The right of persons to choose their own names as they see fit,
including using different names for different purposes.
The right to choose "the noun of your own identity" is the core
expression of the principle that you are a free person.
b) The ability of the justice system to catch and prosecute people who
abuse that freedom as a means of harming others.
"The right to keep and bear names" resembles the issues over firearms
and cryptography (including steganography).
But there's another issue afoot, which is:
c) Using Big Data as a means of maximizing profit by prediction and
control of individuals' behavior.
If someone's goal is to milk you for all you're worth, the more they
know about you, the better they can milk you at work, and milk you in
your free time. This issue can easily hide behind (b), since "unique
identifiers" in databases are convergent with "attribution" in
intelligence & law enforcement.
But why stop at the internet? Someone could go to the corner store, buy
a candy bar anonymously with cash, inject poison into the candy bar, and
slip it back onto another store's shelf to be bought by an unsuspecting
victim. A handful of people could do that across the country and cause
multiple casualties and panic, just as happened with the poisoned
Tylenol in 1982.
So why not require official photo ID for every single purchase? For a
while, various corporate interests have been chirping about the
"convenience" of "going cash-less" for example by using smartphones
as
universal payment cards. (It's not tyranny, it's "convenience"!)
In a month or so you won't be able to cross the Golden Gate Bridge
anonymously by paying cash: you'll need a "Fast Track" or a credit card,
or your license plate will be photographed and a bill for the toll sent
to your vehicle registration address. This is just begging for a lawsuit.
The way to launch that lawsuit is to stop at the CalTrans office at the
bridge, where they expect you to provide a credit card in lieu of using
Fast Track, and insist on doing it for cash, anonymously. When the
transaction is refused, ask to speak with a supervisor and get it in
writing. Then let them know, politely and with good cheer, that
CalTrans can expect to be served with a lawsuit. It might be most
effective to do this with a media reporter on hand, ideally taking video
of the whole thing ("if you get to take video, we get to take video").
A few other items:
= Re. Burning Man: for a while they've been going more corporate behind
the scenes, so it would not surprise me if they were falling for the
seduction of Big Data. And let's not forget the possible influence of
computer geeks on their staff, looking for projects that will keep them
happily employed, and conveniently jumping on the "privacy is obsolete"
bandwagon to justify it.
= "What's wrong with having to get a warrant from a judge?" is a
powerful rhetorical point. There is exactly nothing about new
technologies, to invalidate the principle that law enforcement's need to
use surveillance must be subject to the check and balance of the
judicial branch.
= "Legal names" are for legal documents, not for everyday life. Buying
candy and posting online are not equivalent to signing a contract or
swearing out a deposition or making a will. You don't expect your
sweetheart to call you by your legal name in bed.
= Ultimately we won the crypto debate in the 1980s because the power of
business was allied with the power of civil liberties: crypto
facilitates online transactions.
= We may be able to harness the power of commerce here as well: some
evidence is beginning to accumulate that people become more reserved
about making online purchases, if they know that their buying habits are
being collected and scrutinized by Big Data.
= "Buy anonymous, pay cash" has the potential to gain strength if it
gets traction in business. Local currencies are important. "Gift
cards" and other anonymous pre-paid cards are important. Getting local
business onboard for this is important. CTel will have prepaid accounts
for mesh voice/data service, with freedom of name. There is a huge
opportunity for someone to start a business that intermediates online
transactions to support freedom of name. About which more in my next
email...
-G.
=====
On 13-03-14-Thu 3:33 PM, aestetix wrote:
Oh hai!
NymRights is dedicated to making sure people can use the names they
choose on the Internet. This saturday at 2pm we're having a meeting at
sudo room. Among things we'll be discussing:
How the Phoenix IDESG plenary went
The NymRights "suggested policy" for names on websites
Reception of my Shmoocon talk
General name-related nuttery
It is open to all, please come if this is something that interests
you! http://www.nymrights.org for more info!
Cheers,
aestetix
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
7:34 p.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: making it stick via commerce.
Yo's-
It occurred to me, there's fertile ground for a viable startup (and more
right-livelihood jobs), as follows (people from SudoRoom & other local
hackerspaces could do this):
Anonymous e-commerce (Anonymerse?;-)
How it works from the average user's perspective:
You purchase a prepaid card such as a gift card, using cash. It has a
card number but not a name on it.
With this card, you sign up for an Anonymerse account, using any name
you choose, and providing the card number for purchases on your account.
The account comes with webmail in your chosen name, so it's not linked
to your broadband provider.
Now you can go online and buy stuff you don't want linked to your "legal
name." A pair of socks here, a (consenting adult) porn DVD there, a
dissident political book, whatever.
If the online purchases are downloads, you can download them via your
Anonymerse webmail account.
If the purchases are physical goods, you can have them delivered. But
where, that won't be tracked to your "legal name"?
The answer is: "Track the package, not the person."
Ever hear of "private mailbox" services? FedEx and UPS run these as a
chain, but there are scores of "mom & pop" services like this; I've
used
one since the early 80s. They have a trade association. So we get the
trade association onboard as follows:
If someone wants a package shipped to a private mailbox service and they
are not a regular boxholder, they can receive the package by providing
a) the package tracking number from the Post Office, FedEx, or UPS, and
b) paying a nominal fee for receiving & handling, that is equivalent to
the mailbox service's fee for handling when they ship something.
So you receive the invoice and package tracking number at your
Anonymerse webmail address, and you print out the tracking information,
and bring it into the private mailbox service where you've had the
package shipped.
If the private mailbox services don't want to do it, the same service
could be provided by any "mom & pop" corner store.
Amazon is presently setting up a deal with 7-11 stores to handle
packages for people who can't be at home during delivery hours. You
order something from Amazon and it comes in to your local 7-11, which
holds it for you until you come in to pick it up after work. This gives
7-11 stores a service they can offer that local mom & pop stores can't.
So we go to those mom & pop stores with something that will compete with
7-11, and they'll be eager to do it.
OK, now how do we prevent this being used by Fred Fraudster, Pete
Pedophile, and Terry Terrorist?
One way would be for the stores to take your picture for every package
pickup. The contents of stores' video systems are typically not
available to third parties except with a subpoena or a search warrant.
To my mind those protections are sufficient: they are traditional
powers, not "expanded" or "enhanced" powers.
Another option would be to require photo ID, same as when buying alcohol
beverages, which has the same protections for these types of
decentralized transactions. For example if someone buys alcohol for a
minor, who then drinks, drives, and runs over a pedestrian, the legal
system can seek to discover where the alcohol was bought and who bought
it. This isn't considered a civil liberties threat, and The Powers That
Be have not used this information for fishing expeditions.
So, Anonymerse Inc. can provide the participating stores with a camera
or recording device for photo IDs, that is encrypted with an Anonymerse
key. It would have a MODEM connection, not an Ethernet or broadband
connection, so getting data from it would not be "easy." If an attorney
or law enforcement, bearing a subpoena or search warrant, wants to get
at the data, the shop owner would convey the warrant or subpoena to
Anonymerse, which would provide the decryption key for that store's data
recording unit. At that point the data could be downloaded via MODEM:
it would take a while, but the wheels of justice are designed to turn
slowly. A "keep-alive" key might be needed to be refreshed on a weekly
basis to prevent the unit from self-wiping on the basis that it might
have been stolen.
If this works as planned, there should be sufficient volume of
commercial transactions to make it impossible to stop. Keep in mind
that when PayPal was first started, there was a lot of talk about it
being an illegal violation of banking regulations and so on.
PayPal won that round. We could win the next round.
-G.
7:55 p.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: making it stick via commerce.
While i entirely support this, money laundering is illegal as far as i
know. But, it would still be interesting to find a loophole and make
something like this in a simplified form work.
Keep in mind though that pay pal is still around due to thier draconian
practice of holding and sometimes keeping the proceeds of any mildly
"risky" transaction.
On Mar 16, 2013 7:34 PM, "Anon195714" <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
Yo's-
It occurred to me, there's fertile ground for a viable startup (and more
right-livelihood jobs), as follows (people from SudoRoom & other local
hackerspaces could do this):
Anonymous e-commerce (Anonymerse?;-)
How it works from the average user's perspective:
You purchase a prepaid card such as a gift card, using cash. It has a
card number but not a name on it.
With this card, you sign up for an Anonymerse account, using any name
you choose, and providing the card number for purchases on your account.
The account comes with webmail in your chosen name, so it's not linked
to your broadband provider.
Now you can go online and buy stuff you don't want linked to your "legal
name." A pair of socks here, a (consenting adult) porn DVD there, a
dissident political book, whatever.
If the online purchases are downloads, you can download them via your
Anonymerse webmail account.
If the purchases are physical goods, you can have them delivered. But
where, that won't be tracked to your "legal name"?
The answer is: "Track the package, not the person."
Ever hear of "private mailbox" services? FedEx and UPS run these as a
chain, but there are scores of "mom & pop" services like this; I've
used
one since the early 80s. They have a trade association. So we get the
trade association onboard as follows:
If someone wants a package shipped to a private mailbox service and they
are not a regular boxholder, they can receive the package by providing
a) the package tracking number from the Post Office, FedEx, or UPS, and
b) paying a nominal fee for receiving & handling, that is equivalent to
the mailbox service's fee for handling when they ship something.
So you receive the invoice and package tracking number at your
Anonymerse webmail address, and you print out the tracking information,
and bring it into the private mailbox service where you've had the
package shipped.
If the private mailbox services don't want to do it, the same service
could be provided by any "mom & pop" corner store.
Amazon is presently setting up a deal with 7-11 stores to handle
packages for people who can't be at home during delivery hours. You
order something from Amazon and it comes in to your local 7-11, which
holds it for you until you come in to pick it up after work. This gives
7-11 stores a service they can offer that local mom & pop stores can't.
So we go to those mom & pop stores with something that will compete with
7-11, and they'll be eager to do it.
OK, now how do we prevent this being used by Fred Fraudster, Pete
Pedophile, and Terry Terrorist?
One way would be for the stores to take your picture for every package
pickup. The contents of stores' video systems are typically not
available to third parties except with a subpoena or a search warrant.
To my mind those protections are sufficient: they are traditional
powers, not "expanded" or "enhanced" powers.
Another option would be to require photo ID, same as when buying alcohol
beverages, which has the same protections for these types of
decentralized transactions. For example if someone buys alcohol for a
minor, who then drinks, drives, and runs over a pedestrian, the legal
system can seek to discover where the alcohol was bought and who bought
it. This isn't considered a civil liberties threat, and The Powers That
Be have not used this information for fishing expeditions.
So, Anonymerse Inc. can provide the participating stores with a camera
or recording device for photo IDs, that is encrypted with an Anonymerse
key. It would have a MODEM connection, not an Ethernet or broadband
connection, so getting data from it would not be "easy." If an attorney
or law enforcement, bearing a subpoena or search warrant, wants to get
at the data, the shop owner would convey the warrant or subpoena to
Anonymerse, which would provide the decryption key for that store's data
recording unit. At that point the data could be downloaded via MODEM:
it would take a while, but the wheels of justice are designed to turn
slowly. A "keep-alive" key might be needed to be refreshed on a weekly
basis to prevent the unit from self-wiping on the basis that it might
have been stolen.
If this works as planned, there should be sufficient volume of
commercial transactions to make it impossible to stop. Keep in mind
that when PayPal was first started, there was a lot of talk about it
being an illegal violation of banking regulations and so on.
PayPal won that round. We could win the next round.
-G.
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
8:19 p.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: making it stick via commerce.
Hi Andrew-
Do you know for a fact that the legal issue with PayPal was "money
laundering", and that they solved it by some kind of agreement to hold
and optionally keep the proceeds of "risky" transactions?
I'd be interested in the legal definition of money laundering. I'm
inclined to believe that the definition includes a provision about
"...for criminal purposes, or in facilitation of a criminal or
civilly-tortious act..." That is, the mere fact of anonymity does not
make for money laundering, any more than it does when paying cash.
But how does Anonymerse differ from any other transaction with a
pre-paid (anonymous) card? That is, if you get a gift card for Target
and you go into the store and buy a few pairs of underwear, does the
store require to see photo ID?, and if so, what do they do with the name
data they collect? And then, why don't they card you when you pay cash,
which after all could be stolen money?
IF the only thing standing between us and Anonymerse is to agree to hold
up "risky" transactions, then we can agree to do that: no purchases of
firearms, ammo, chemicals, biological materials, or "any goods that are
restricted from being freely shipped via the Post Office."
The "Post Office" explanation is good enough to serve the purpose
without appearing to give even an inch on the core civil rights issues.
There are some who would object to such limitations, but to my mind they
are a small price to pay for the freedom to buy _anything else_ without
having one's name attached to it and subject to stalking by Big Data.
But "risky transactions" are not isomorphic with "money laundering"
or
"criminal purposes," as someone could just as easily convert stolen
money into any conventional goods and sell the goods on Ebay.
When the crypto debate was a hot topic, I had a few lengthy
conversations with a woman who was a federal prosecutor in a
high-profile hacker case (at the time, there was a lot of friendly
debate between hackers and feds, so a lot of people were having these
kinds of conversations; nowadays similar conversations are occurring
about biohacking).
My position was that for every criminal act there are physical
concomitants that can be used as evidence to convict. She raised the
issues of financial fraud and child pornography. I conceded that she
had a valid point there: the evidence for those crimes could be pure
information, and if encrypted, inaccessible to prosecution. But in any
case, the crypto debate was won by e-commerce and EFF legal actions.
But here we're only talking about the ability to perform online
transactions with the same anonymity as cash transactions: taking
something that occurs face-to-face all the time and bringing it online.
This should be an easier debate to win.
There's another potential fallback position that could be an absolute
win: that Anonymerse would collect legal names, but would not provide
them to third parties except under subpoena or search warrant. That
kills any objection that's based on the issue of potential money laundering.
There's a really major point that needs to be made here, that most
people don't get.
And that includes most people at Sudo Room.
I'll put it in subsequent email to follow this...
-G.
=====
On 13-03-16-Sat 7:55 PM, Andrew wrote:
While i entirely support this, money laundering is illegal as far as i
know. But, it would still be interesting to find a loophole and make
something like this in a simplified form work.
Keep in mind though that pay pal is still around due to thier
draconian practice of holding and sometimes keeping the proceeds of
any mildly "risky" transaction.
On Mar 16, 2013 7:34 PM, "Anon195714" <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net
<mailto:anon195714@sbcglobal.net>> wrote:
Yo's-
It occurred to me, there's fertile ground for a viable startup
(and more
right-livelihood jobs), as follows (people from SudoRoom & other local
hackerspaces could do this):
Anonymous e-commerce (Anonymerse?;-)
How it works from the average user's perspective:
You purchase a prepaid card such as a gift card, using cash. It has a
card number but not a name on it.
With this card, you sign up for an Anonymerse account, using any name
you choose, and providing the card number for purchases on your
account.
The account comes with webmail in your chosen name, so it's not linked
to your broadband provider.
Now you can go online and buy stuff you don't want linked to your
"legal
name." A pair of socks here, a (consenting adult) porn DVD there, a
dissident political book, whatever.
If the online purchases are downloads, you can download them via your
Anonymerse webmail account.
If the purchases are physical goods, you can have them delivered. But
where, that won't be tracked to your "legal name"?
The answer is: "Track the package, not the person."
Ever hear of "private mailbox" services? FedEx and UPS run these as a
chain, but there are scores of "mom & pop" services like this;
I've used
one since the early 80s. They have a trade association. So we
get the
trade association onboard as follows:
If someone wants a package shipped to a private mailbox service
and they
are not a regular boxholder, they can receive the package by providing
a) the package tracking number from the Post Office, FedEx, or
UPS, and
b) paying a nominal fee for receiving & handling, that is
equivalent to
the mailbox service's fee for handling when they ship something.
So you receive the invoice and package tracking number at your
Anonymerse webmail address, and you print out the tracking
information,
and bring it into the private mailbox service where you've had the
package shipped.
If the private mailbox services don't want to do it, the same service
could be provided by any "mom & pop" corner store.
Amazon is presently setting up a deal with 7-11 stores to handle
packages for people who can't be at home during delivery hours. You
order something from Amazon and it comes in to your local 7-11, which
holds it for you until you come in to pick it up after work. This
gives
7-11 stores a service they can offer that local mom & pop stores
can't.
So we go to those mom & pop stores with something that will
compete with
7-11, and they'll be eager to do it.
OK, now how do we prevent this being used by Fred Fraudster, Pete
Pedophile, and Terry Terrorist?
One way would be for the stores to take your picture for every package
pickup. The contents of stores' video systems are typically not
available to third parties except with a subpoena or a search warrant.
To my mind those protections are sufficient: they are traditional
powers, not "expanded" or "enhanced" powers.
Another option would be to require photo ID, same as when buying
alcohol
beverages, which has the same protections for these types of
decentralized transactions. For example if someone buys alcohol for a
minor, who then drinks, drives, and runs over a pedestrian, the legal
system can seek to discover where the alcohol was bought and who
bought
it. This isn't considered a civil liberties threat, and The
Powers That
Be have not used this information for fishing expeditions.
So, Anonymerse Inc. can provide the participating stores with a camera
or recording device for photo IDs, that is encrypted with an
Anonymerse
key. It would have a MODEM connection, not an Ethernet or broadband
connection, so getting data from it would not be "easy." If an
attorney
or law enforcement, bearing a subpoena or search warrant, wants to get
at the data, the shop owner would convey the warrant or subpoena to
Anonymerse, which would provide the decryption key for that
store's data
recording unit. At that point the data could be downloaded via MODEM:
it would take a while, but the wheels of justice are designed to turn
slowly. A "keep-alive" key might be needed to be refreshed on a
weekly
basis to prevent the unit from self-wiping on the basis that it might
have been stolen.
If this works as planned, there should be sufficient volume of
commercial transactions to make it impossible to stop. Keep in mind
that when PayPal was first started, there was a lot of talk about it
being an illegal violation of banking regulations and so on.
PayPal won that round. We could win the next round.
-G.
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
<mailto:sudo-discuss@lists.sudoroom.org>
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
22 Mar
22 Mar
9:42 a.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: making it stick via commerce.
I'm not talking about pay pal's reaction to money laundering, but there
reaction to pretty much anything they think is maybe not right
http://lifehacker.com/5821634/why-you-should-ditch-paypal-and-use-these-oth…
"They like to make poor decisions in the name of security, such as holding
your money under review for no
reason<http://consumerist.com/2011/06/paypal-keeps-freelancers-pay-under…
, draining your checking account when you report
fraud<http://consumerist.com/2011/02/paypal-resolves-dispute-in-your-fav…
,putting 20% of your money in a rolling reserve account without
asking<http://consumerist.com/2009/08/paypal-takes-bite-out-of-users-fun…ml>,
and much more <http://www.aboutpaypal.org/>. Personally, despite being a
long-time user, I've had funds held for virtually no reason at all on
several occasions and a number of other minor but nonetheless inconvenient
problems."
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 8:19 PM, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net>wrote;wrote:
Hi Andrew-
Do you know for a fact that the legal issue with PayPal was "money
laundering", and that they solved it by some kind of agreement to hold and
optionally keep the proceeds of "risky" transactions?
I'd be interested in the legal definition of money laundering. I'm
inclined to believe that the definition includes a provision about "...for
criminal purposes, or in facilitation of a criminal or civilly-tortious
act..." That is, the mere fact of anonymity does not make for money
laundering, any more than it does when paying cash.
But how does Anonymerse differ from any other transaction with a pre-paid
(anonymous) card? That is, if you get a gift card for Target and you go
into the store and buy a few pairs of underwear, does the store require to
see photo ID?, and if so, what do they do with the name data they collect?
And then, why don't they card you when you pay cash, which after all could
be stolen money?
IF the only thing standing between us and Anonymerse is to agree to hold
up "risky" transactions, then we can agree to do that: no purchases of
firearms, ammo, chemicals, biological materials, or "any goods that are
restricted from being freely shipped via the Post Office."
The "Post Office" explanation is good enough to serve the purpose without
appearing to give even an inch on the core civil rights issues. There are
some who would object to such limitations, but to my mind they are a small
price to pay for the freedom to buy _anything else_ without having one's
name attached to it and subject to stalking by Big Data.
But "risky transactions" are not isomorphic with "money laundering"
or
"criminal purposes," as someone could just as easily convert stolen money
into any conventional goods and sell the goods on Ebay.
When the crypto debate was a hot topic, I had a few lengthy conversations
with a woman who was a federal prosecutor in a high-profile hacker case (at
the time, there was a lot of friendly debate between hackers and feds, so a
lot of people were having these kinds of conversations; nowadays similar
conversations are occurring about biohacking).
My position was that for every criminal act there are physical
concomitants that can be used as evidence to convict. She raised the
issues of financial fraud and child pornography. I conceded that she had a
valid point there: the evidence for those crimes could be pure information,
and if encrypted, inaccessible to prosecution. But in any case, the crypto
debate was won by e-commerce and EFF legal actions.
But here we're only talking about the ability to perform online
transactions with the same anonymity as cash transactions: taking something
that occurs face-to-face all the time and bringing it online. This should
be an easier debate to win.
There's another potential fallback position that could be an absolute win:
that Anonymerse would collect legal names, but would not provide them to
third parties except under subpoena or search warrant. That kills any
objection that's based on the issue of potential money laundering.
There's a really major point that needs to be made here, that most people
don't get.
And that includes most people at Sudo Room.
I'll put it in subsequent email to follow this...
-G.
=====
On 13-03-16-Sat 7:55 PM, Andrew wrote:
While i entirely support this, money laundering is illegal as far as i
know. But, it would still be interesting to find a loophole and make
something like this in a simplified form work.
Keep in mind though that pay pal is still around due to thier draconian
practice of holding and sometimes keeping the proceeds of any mildly
"risky" transaction.
On Mar 16, 2013 7:34 PM, "Anon195714" <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
--
---------
Andrew Lowe
http://www.lostways.com
Yo's-
It occurred to me, there's fertile ground for a viable startup (and more
right-livelihood jobs), as follows (people from SudoRoom & other local
hackerspaces could do this):
Anonymous e-commerce (Anonymerse?;-)
How it works from the average user's perspective:
You purchase a prepaid card such as a gift card, using cash. It has a
card number but not a name on it.
With this card, you sign up for an Anonymerse account, using any name
you choose, and providing the card number for purchases on your account.
The account comes with webmail in your chosen name, so it's not linked
to your broadband provider.
Now you can go online and buy stuff you don't want linked to your "legal
name." A pair of socks here, a (consenting adult) porn DVD there, a
dissident political book, whatever.
If the online purchases are downloads, you can download them via your
Anonymerse webmail account.
If the purchases are physical goods, you can have them delivered. But
where, that won't be tracked to your "legal name"?
The answer is: "Track the package, not the person."
Ever hear of "private mailbox" services? FedEx and UPS run these as a
chain, but there are scores of "mom & pop" services like this; I've
used
one since the early 80s. They have a trade association. So we get the
trade association onboard as follows:
If someone wants a package shipped to a private mailbox service and they
are not a regular boxholder, they can receive the package by providing
a) the package tracking number from the Post Office, FedEx, or UPS, and
b) paying a nominal fee for receiving & handling, that is equivalent to
the mailbox service's fee for handling when they ship something.
So you receive the invoice and package tracking number at your
Anonymerse webmail address, and you print out the tracking information,
and bring it into the private mailbox service where you've had the
package shipped.
If the private mailbox services don't want to do it, the same service
could be provided by any "mom & pop" corner store.
Amazon is presently setting up a deal with 7-11 stores to handle
packages for people who can't be at home during delivery hours. You
order something from Amazon and it comes in to your local 7-11, which
holds it for you until you come in to pick it up after work. This gives
7-11 stores a service they can offer that local mom & pop stores can't.
So we go to those mom & pop stores with something that will compete with
7-11, and they'll be eager to do it.
OK, now how do we prevent this being used by Fred Fraudster, Pete
Pedophile, and Terry Terrorist?
One way would be for the stores to take your picture for every package
pickup. The contents of stores' video systems are typically not
available to third parties except with a subpoena or a search warrant.
To my mind those protections are sufficient: they are traditional
powers, not "expanded" or "enhanced" powers.
Another option would be to require photo ID, same as when buying alcohol
beverages, which has the same protections for these types of
decentralized transactions. For example if someone buys alcohol for a
minor, who then drinks, drives, and runs over a pedestrian, the legal
system can seek to discover where the alcohol was bought and who bought
it. This isn't considered a civil liberties threat, and The Powers That
Be have not used this information for fishing expeditions.
So, Anonymerse Inc. can provide the participating stores with a camera
or recording device for photo IDs, that is encrypted with an Anonymerse
key. It would have a MODEM connection, not an Ethernet or broadband
connection, so getting data from it would not be "easy." If an attorney
or law enforcement, bearing a subpoena or search warrant, wants to get
at the data, the shop owner would convey the warrant or subpoena to
Anonymerse, which would provide the decryption key for that store's data
recording unit. At that point the data could be downloaded via MODEM:
it would take a while, but the wheels of justice are designed to turn
slowly. A "keep-alive" key might be needed to be refreshed on a weekly
basis to prevent the unit from self-wiping on the basis that it might
have been stolen.
If this works as planned, there should be sufficient volume of
commercial transactions to make it impossible to stop. Keep in mind
that when PayPal was first started, there was a lot of talk about it
being an illegal violation of banking regulations and so on.
PayPal won that round. We could win the next round.
-G.
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
9:47 a.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: making it stick via commerce.
paypal is definitely sketchy...just 2 days ago I was about to use it for a website that
didn't have an obvious CC option. they said i was approaching my limit (?) and asked
me to give my checking account number, HAH! thanks for this info Andrew, extremely shady
operation there. i don't even pay my landlord with personal checks, damned if paypal
is getting my info!
Mar 22, 2013 09:42:32 AM, andrew(a)roshambomedia.com wrote:
I'm not talking about pay pal's reaction to money laundering, but there reaction
to pretty much anything they think is maybe not right
Hi Andrew-
Do you know for a fact that the legal issue
with PayPal was "money
laundering", and that they solved it by some kind of agreement to
hold and optionally keep the proceeds of "risky" transactions?
I'd be interested in the legal
definition of money laundering. I'm
inclined to believe that the definition includes a provision about
"...for criminal purposes, or in facilitation of a criminal or
civilly-tortious act..." That is, the mere fact of anonymity does
not make for money laundering, any more than it does when paying
cash.
But how does Anonymerse differ from any
other transaction with a
pre-paid (anonymous) card? That is, if you get a gift card for
Target and you go into the store and buy a few pairs of underwear,
does the store require to see photo ID?, and if so, what do they do
with the name data they collect? And then, why don't they card you
when you pay cash, which after all could be stolen money?
IF the only thing standing between us and
Anonymerse is to agree to
hold up "risky" transactions, then we can agree to do that: no
purchases of firearms, ammo, chemicals, biological materials, or
"any goods that are restricted from being freely shipped via the
Post Office."
The "Post Office" explanation is
good enough to serve the purpose
without appearing to give even an inch on the core civil rights
issues. There are some who would object to such limitations, but to
my mind they are a small price to pay for the freedom to buy
_anything else_ without having one's name attached to it and subject
to stalking by Big Data.
But "risky transactions" are not
isomorphic with "money laundering"
or "criminal purposes," as someone could just as easily convert
stolen money into any conventional goods and sell the goods on Ebay.
When the crypto debate was a hot topic, I
had a few lengthy
conversations with a woman who was a federal prosecutor in a
high-profile hacker case (at the time, there was a lot of friendly
debate between hackers and feds, so a lot of people were having
these kinds of conversations; nowadays similar conversations are
occurring about biohacking).
My position was that for every criminal act
there are physical
concomitants that can be used as evidence to convict. She raised
the issues of financial fraud and child pornography. I conceded
that she had a valid point there: the evidence for those crimes
could be pure information, and if encrypted, inaccessible to
prosecution. But in any case, the crypto debate was won by
e-commerce and EFF legal actions.
But here we're only talking about the
ability to perform online
transactions with the same anonymity as cash transactions: taking
something that occurs face-to-face all the time and bringing it
online. This should be an easier debate to win.
There's another potential fallback
position that could be an
absolute win: that Anonymerse would collect legal names, but would
not provide them to third parties except under subpoena or search
warrant. That kills any objection that's based on the issue of
potential money laundering.
There's a really major point that needs
to be made here, that most
people don't get.
And that includes most people at Sudo Room.
I'll put it in subsequent email to
follow this...
-G.
=====
On 13-03-16-Sat 7:55 PM, Andrew wrote:
While i entirely support this, money
laundering is illegal as
far as i know. But, it would still be interesting to find a
loophole and make something like this in a simplified form work.
Keep in mind though that pay pal is still around due to thier
draconian practice of holding and sometimes keeping the proceeds
of any mildly "risky" transaction.
On Mar 16, 2013 7:34 PM, "Anon195714"
anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net wrote:
Yo's-
It occurred to me, there's fertile
ground for a viable startup
(and more
right-livelihood jobs), as follows
(people from SudoRoom &
other local
hackerspaces could do this):
Anonymous e-commerce (Anonymerse?;-)
How it works from the average
user's perspective:
You purchase a prepaid card such as a
gift card, using cash.
It has a
card number but not a name on it.
With this card, you sign up for an
Anonymerse account, using
any name
you choose, and providing the card
number for purchases on
your account.
The account comes with webmail in your
chosen name, so it's
not linked
to your broadband provider.
Now you can go online and buy stuff
you don't want linked to
your "legal
name." A pair of socks here, a
(consenting adult) porn DVD
there, a
dissident political book, whatever.
If the online purchases are downloads,
you can download them
via your
Anonymerse webmail account.
If the purchases are physical goods,
you can have them
delivered. But
where, that won't be tracked to
your "legal name"?
The answer is: "Track the
package, not the person."
Ever hear of "private
mailbox" services? FedEx and UPS run
these as a
chain, but there are scores of
"mom & pop" services like
this; I've used
one since the early 80s. They have a
trade association. So
we get the
trade association onboard as follows:
If someone wants a package shipped to
a private mailbox
service and they
are not a regular boxholder, they can
receive the package by
providing
a) the package tracking number from
the Post Office, FedEx, or
UPS, and
b) paying a nominal fee for receiving
& handling, that is
equivalent to
the mailbox service's fee for
handling when they ship
something.
So you receive the invoice and package
tracking number at your
Anonymerse webmail address, and you
print out the tracking
information,
and bring it into the private mailbox
service where you've had
the
package shipped.
If the private mailbox services
don't want to do it, the same
service
could be provided by any "mom
& pop" corner store.
Amazon is presently setting up a deal
with 7-11 stores to
handle
packages for people who can't be
at home during delivery
hours. You
order something from Amazon and it
comes in to your local
7-11, which
holds it for you until you come in to
pick it up after work.
This gives
7-11 stores a service they can offer
that local mom & pop
stores can't.
So we go to those mom & pop stores
with something that
will compete with
7-11, and they'll be eager to do
it.
OK, now how do we prevent this being
used by Fred Fraudster,
Pete
Pedophile, and Terry Terrorist?
One way would be for the stores to
take your picture for every
package
pickup. The contents of stores'
video systems are typically
not
available to third parties except with
a subpoena or a search
warrant.
To my mind those protections are
sufficient: they are
traditional
powers, not "expanded" or
"enhanced" powers.
Another option would be to require
photo ID, same as when
buying alcohol
beverages, which has the same
protections for these types of
decentralized transactions. For
example if someone buys
alcohol for a
minor, who then drinks, drives, and
runs over a pedestrian,
the legal
system can seek to discover where the
alcohol was bought and
who bought
it. This isn't considered a civil
liberties threat, and The
Powers That
Be have not used this information for
fishing expeditions.
So, Anonymerse Inc. can provide the
participating stores with
a camera
or recording device for photo IDs,
that is encrypted with an
Anonymerse
key. It would have a MODEM
connection, not an Ethernet or
broadband
connection, so getting data from it
would not be "easy." If
an attorney
or law enforcement, bearing a subpoena
or search warrant,
wants to get
at the data, the shop owner would
convey the warrant or
subpoena to
Anonymerse, which would provide the
decryption key for that
store's data
recording unit. At that point the
data could be downloaded
via MODEM:
it would take a while, but the wheels
of justice are designed
to turn
slowly. A "keep-alive" key
might be needed to be refreshed on
a weekly
basis to prevent the unit from
self-wiping on the basis that
it might
have been stolen.
If this works as planned, there should
be sufficient volume of
commercial transactions to make it
impossible to stop. Keep
in mind
that when PayPal was first started,
there was a lot of talk
about it
being an illegal violation of banking
regulations and so on.
PayPal won that round. We could win
the next round.
-G.
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>--
>---------
>Andrew Lowe
>http://www.lostways.com
>_______________________________________________
>sudo-discuss mailing list
>sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
>http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
"They like to make poor decisions in the name of
security, such as holding your money under review for no reason, draining your checking
account when you report fraud,putting 20% of your money in a rolling reserve account
without asking, and much more. Personally, despite being a long-time user, I've had
funds held for virtually no reason at all on several occasions and a number of other minor
but nonetheless inconvenient problems."
On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 8:19 PM, Anon195714 anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote:
16 Mar
16 Mar
9:56 p.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: the Big Stinking Skunk that everyone seems to miss:
Yo's-
There's a big stinking skunk in the room, that everyone seems to miss,
including a lot of people at SudoRoom and other hackerspaces:
The biggest threat to freedom & privacy is not the government, law
enforcement, the intelligence agencies, etc.
The biggest threat is the corporate sector. And many of us are
willingly serving ourselves up to them on a silver platter, with
condiments included, and dragging our friends into it with something
less than fully informed consent.
What government can do to you with the data they collect: Prosecute you
for a crime or disappear you to Gitmo. Some day, though at present it's
merely a paranoid fantasy, perhaps order a drone strike to shoot you on
the street.
What the private sector can do to you: Get you fired from your job,
deny you the ability to get another job, or an apartment, a mortgage,
health insurance, a bank account, or plain-vanilla consumer credit.
Which set of consequences is more likely to happen to you? Which set of
consequences causes more fear today? Which set of consequences
realistically makes you look over your shoulder?
On a day-to-day basis, are Americans talking about their fear of going
to prison, or about their fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes,
losing their health coverage, etc.? Do you know anyone who has a kid?
Ask them whether they're more afraid of going to prison or of losing
their job and the roof over their head.
Round-ups of dissidents make news. Political prosecutions make news.
Suicides of young guys who were being aggressively prosecuted for
hacking, make news.
Someone getting fired (or not getting hired) because their boss found an
"objectionable" comment by them somewhere online, or an embarrassing
picture of them on Facebook, doesn't make the news.
As far as the media and public opinion are concerned, losing your job
and losing the roof over your head don't make you a persecuted
dissident, they make you a "loser." And when you rant about getting
fired or denied an apartment because of your politics or your lifestyle,
you're not just a "loser" but a "whiny loser."
There is no more effective means of enforcing servile conformity than to
offer mundane rewards and punishments, that individuals internalize.
There is no more effective way to get people to comply, than to sell
compliance as "convenience." As a science fiction character of mine
said in the 80s, "Why put a person in prison, when you can put prison in
the person?"
But there's something even more insidious about this.
It creates a culture of internalized compliance, conformity, and
submission. A culture where dissent and nonconformity are "tolerated"
(because overt repression would trigger more dissent), but where the
vast majority does what is expected of them. A culture where today
people say "privacy is obsolete" and "there is no more privacy," a
culture that's one step away from "freedom is obsolete."
The biggest risk is not that you'll personally be targeted, lose your
job, and end up homeless. The biggest risk is that the culture as a
whole won't give a fiddler's fig about those who are quietly
dispossessed, because everyone is too busy falling in line to chase the
latest consumer baubles, or to keep from being eaten by the latest
economic alligators.
Big Data is the feed-in to that system.
Do you have any idea of the totality of tracking that's going on now?
Keyword search "flash cookies" or go to http://www.eff.org and search
their website for their write-ups about 'em. Look up "super cookies"
and "LSOs" or "local stored objects" while you're at it.
Depending on your operating system & browser, take a close look at the
files & folders on your machine that store these things. Open the
folders and watch what happens when you turn up the privacy settings on
your browser, or click the options to clear your cache, cookies,
browsing history, etc. What you'll see is that these f---ing bugs
instantly regenerate themselves: like cockroaches they are almost
impossible to kill off entirely.
Using open-source OS & browsers doesn't fix this. You can write a
custom script to route them to dev null and it won't stop them. They
are designed to thwart your security measures and keep on sending data
to their owners, no matter what you do. They are arguably a criminal
violation of anti-hacking statutes because they circumvent security
measures on machines, but so far nobody has raised a lawsuit about that
(I have pestered the folks I know at EFF about this and will keep doing
so, but their docket is pretty jammed as it is). "Privacy policies"
that destroy privacy are arguably "contracts of adhesion" that are not
enforceable. And yet....
Everywhere you go online, everything you do online, is being collected
with a degree of completeness that would cause you to crap your pants if
you knew how far it goes.
The ostensible goal is to sell advertising. But I have a question:
what's the actual return on investment for that? How many goods &
services are actually sold because advertisers can "target" you for
"personalized" messages? How often have you bought something because
you got a targeted ad? I'm willing to bet: not enough to justify the
amount of money being spent on all the tracking, spying, and digital
flashlights shoved up our collective colon.
The purveyors of all this neo-surveillance are basically scamming the
business world when they say it's "necessary" to "remain
competitive"
and all that nonsense. One could make the same claim for telemarketing,
and the only ones who get rich on it are the telemarketers themselves.
So here's where fellow Sudoers and other friendly folks end up turning
themselves into FOOD for Big Data, and dragging their friends into it
with something less than informed consent:
Facebook, Google, texting, and smartphones. And very soon, Verizon and
other cable TV services, about which more some other time, keyphrase
"watch you cuddle."
Most of us here despise Facebook, except we'll give someone a pass for
using it if they're a public or quasi-public figure who wants to use it
for publicity purposes.
But very very many of us here use Gmail addresses and Google Voice
telephone numbers.
Google is the paradigm case of Big Data. Even NSA is envious of Google,
and NSA recently adopted a Google database system for use in their new
facility in Utah.
When you use GMail or Google Voice, you are being subjected to the same
kind of keyword-recognition collection & analysis system that NSA uses
for intercepting overseas traffic. The difference is that you don't get
to vote for their boss every four years.
When the only way to reach someone by email is at their GMail address,
and the only way to reach them by phone is by calling their Google Voice
number, they are effectively saying to their friends: "If you want to
write to me or talk to me, you have to submit to intensive
surveillance." If you value the friendship, you submit. Or you say
nothing on the phone and nothing in email, other than "let's meet in
person." Thereby throwing away all the potential value of over a
century of communications technology.
What Ithiel de Sola Pool called "technologies of freedom" in 1983, have
become technologies of control that rival _1984_. As Winston Smith said
to O'Brien, when O'Brien switched off the telescreen in his apartment,
"You can turn it off!", and O'Brien replied, "We can turn it off. We
have that privilege." Try taking the battery out of an iPhone. Try
taking the battery out of the forthcoming, and ironically named,
"iWatch." They watch. You can't turn it off. Interesting, that. So
when you hang out with someone who's carrying an iPhone, wearing an
iWatch, or worst of all Google Goggles, once again, you're submitting.
Facebook is a surveillance machine. Google is a surveillance machine.
Twitter is not only a surveillance machine, it was designed as an
intelligence collection platform. I know someone who developed intel
collection & analysis software for use on Twitter. I'll tell that story
in person. "Texting" in general, like Twitter, is an intel collection
platform. And "smartphones" are surveillance devices you carry around
with you. Do you really trust software you can't inspect?, that
controls a camera, a microphone, and a GPS tracker, that you carry
everywhere you go?
There used to be a pretty strong cultural attitude among geeks, hackers,
etc., that using AOL for email, was for losers. Cool People didn't go
anywhere near AOL.
AOL's big sin was censorship. They tried to "moderate" their little
corner of cyberspace. In the end they failed, and at this point (I had
to check that they still exist at all) they are nothing more than
another dumb "aggregator" page.
But make no mistake about this: Surveillance IS censorship.
When people are being watched, they behave differently. They submit,
they conform, they comply.
And in the end, "convenience" is a dumb-ass excuse for compliance.
-G.
17 Mar
17 Mar
2:56 a.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: the Big Stinking Skunk that everyone seems to miss:
Speaking about corporate cellphones where you cant take out the
battery and dont know who
controls the mic:
Would be awesome if the Hacker Community finally comes up with Open
Hardware Mobile Phones and awesome Open Hardware Cameras.
2013/3/16, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net>et>:
Yo's-
There's a big stinking skunk in the room, that everyone seems to miss,
including a lot of people at SudoRoom and other hackerspaces:
The biggest threat to freedom & privacy is not the government, law
enforcement, the intelligence agencies, etc.
The biggest threat is the corporate sector. And many of us are
willingly serving ourselves up to them on a silver platter, with
condiments included, and dragging our friends into it with something
less than fully informed consent.
What government can do to you with the data they collect: Prosecute you
for a crime or disappear you to Gitmo. Some day, though at present it's
merely a paranoid fantasy, perhaps order a drone strike to shoot you on
the street.
What the private sector can do to you: Get you fired from your job,
deny you the ability to get another job, or an apartment, a mortgage,
health insurance, a bank account, or plain-vanilla consumer credit.
Which set of consequences is more likely to happen to you? Which set of
consequences causes more fear today? Which set of consequences
realistically makes you look over your shoulder?
On a day-to-day basis, are Americans talking about their fear of going
to prison, or about their fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes,
losing their health coverage, etc.? Do you know anyone who has a kid?
Ask them whether they're more afraid of going to prison or of losing
their job and the roof over their head.
Round-ups of dissidents make news. Political prosecutions make news.
Suicides of young guys who were being aggressively prosecuted for
hacking, make news.
Someone getting fired (or not getting hired) because their boss found an
"objectionable" comment by them somewhere online, or an embarrassing
picture of them on Facebook, doesn't make the news.
As far as the media and public opinion are concerned, losing your job
and losing the roof over your head don't make you a persecuted
dissident, they make you a "loser." And when you rant about getting
fired or denied an apartment because of your politics or your lifestyle,
you're not just a "loser" but a "whiny loser."
There is no more effective means of enforcing servile conformity than to
offer mundane rewards and punishments, that individuals internalize.
There is no more effective way to get people to comply, than to sell
compliance as "convenience." As a science fiction character of mine
said in the 80s, "Why put a person in prison, when you can put prison in
the person?"
But there's something even more insidious about this.
It creates a culture of internalized compliance, conformity, and
submission. A culture where dissent and nonconformity are "tolerated"
(because overt repression would trigger more dissent), but where the
vast majority does what is expected of them. A culture where today
people say "privacy is obsolete" and "there is no more privacy," a
culture that's one step away from "freedom is obsolete."
The biggest risk is not that you'll personally be targeted, lose your
job, and end up homeless. The biggest risk is that the culture as a
whole won't give a fiddler's fig about those who are quietly
dispossessed, because everyone is too busy falling in line to chase the
latest consumer baubles, or to keep from being eaten by the latest
economic alligators.
Big Data is the feed-in to that system.
Do you have any idea of the totality of tracking that's going on now?
Keyword search "flash cookies" or go to http://www.eff.org and search
their website for their write-ups about 'em. Look up "super cookies"
and "LSOs" or "local stored objects" while you're at it.
Depending on your operating system & browser, take a close look at the
files & folders on your machine that store these things. Open the
folders and watch what happens when you turn up the privacy settings on
your browser, or click the options to clear your cache, cookies,
browsing history, etc. What you'll see is that these f---ing bugs
instantly regenerate themselves: like cockroaches they are almost
impossible to kill off entirely.
Using open-source OS & browsers doesn't fix this. You can write a
custom script to route them to dev null and it won't stop them. They
are designed to thwart your security measures and keep on sending data
to their owners, no matter what you do. They are arguably a criminal
violation of anti-hacking statutes because they circumvent security
measures on machines, but so far nobody has raised a lawsuit about that
(I have pestered the folks I know at EFF about this and will keep doing
so, but their docket is pretty jammed as it is). "Privacy policies"
that destroy privacy are arguably "contracts of adhesion" that are not
enforceable. And yet....
Everywhere you go online, everything you do online, is being collected
with a degree of completeness that would cause you to crap your pants if
you knew how far it goes.
The ostensible goal is to sell advertising. But I have a question:
what's the actual return on investment for that? How many goods &
services are actually sold because advertisers can "target" you for
"personalized" messages? How often have you bought something because
you got a targeted ad? I'm willing to bet: not enough to justify the
amount of money being spent on all the tracking, spying, and digital
flashlights shoved up our collective colon.
The purveyors of all this neo-surveillance are basically scamming the
business world when they say it's "necessary" to "remain
competitive"
and all that nonsense. One could make the same claim for telemarketing,
and the only ones who get rich on it are the telemarketers themselves.
So here's where fellow Sudoers and other friendly folks end up turning
themselves into FOOD for Big Data, and dragging their friends into it
with something less than informed consent:
Facebook, Google, texting, and smartphones. And very soon, Verizon and
other cable TV services, about which more some other time, keyphrase
"watch you cuddle."
Most of us here despise Facebook, except we'll give someone a pass for
using it if they're a public or quasi-public figure who wants to use it
for publicity purposes.
But very very many of us here use Gmail addresses and Google Voice
telephone numbers.
Google is the paradigm case of Big Data. Even NSA is envious of Google,
and NSA recently adopted a Google database system for use in their new
facility in Utah.
When you use GMail or Google Voice, you are being subjected to the same
kind of keyword-recognition collection & analysis system that NSA uses
for intercepting overseas traffic. The difference is that you don't get
to vote for their boss every four years.
When the only way to reach someone by email is at their GMail address,
and the only way to reach them by phone is by calling their Google Voice
number, they are effectively saying to their friends: "If you want to
write to me or talk to me, you have to submit to intensive
surveillance." If you value the friendship, you submit. Or you say
nothing on the phone and nothing in email, other than "let's meet in
person." Thereby throwing away all the potential value of over a
century of communications technology.
What Ithiel de Sola Pool called "technologies of freedom" in 1983, have
become technologies of control that rival _1984_. As Winston Smith said
to O'Brien, when O'Brien switched off the telescreen in his apartment,
"You can turn it off!", and O'Brien replied, "We can turn it off. We
have that privilege." Try taking the battery out of an iPhone. Try
taking the battery out of the forthcoming, and ironically named,
"iWatch." They watch. You can't turn it off. Interesting, that. So
when you hang out with someone who's carrying an iPhone, wearing an
iWatch, or worst of all Google Goggles, once again, you're submitting.
Facebook is a surveillance machine. Google is a surveillance machine.
Twitter is not only a surveillance machine, it was designed as an
intelligence collection platform. I know someone who developed intel
collection & analysis software for use on Twitter. I'll tell that story
in person. "Texting" in general, like Twitter, is an intel collection
platform. And "smartphones" are surveillance devices you carry around
with you. Do you really trust software you can't inspect?, that
controls a camera, a microphone, and a GPS tracker, that you carry
everywhere you go?
There used to be a pretty strong cultural attitude among geeks, hackers,
etc., that using AOL for email, was for losers. Cool People didn't go
anywhere near AOL.
AOL's big sin was censorship. They tried to "moderate" their little
corner of cyberspace. In the end they failed, and at this point (I had
to check that they still exist at all) they are nothing more than
another dumb "aggregator" page.
But make no mistake about this: Surveillance IS censorship.
When people are being watched, they behave differently. They submit,
they conform, they comply.
And in the end, "convenience" is a dumb-ass excuse for compliance.
-G.
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
1:44 p.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: the Big Stinking Skunk that everyone seems to miss:
Thanks for the essay! I didn't expect to read it to the end but your
rant was right on target.
I went to the EFF's presentation at NoiseBridge yesterday and tho I
might have personally benefited more from learning about 3d Printers I
feel slightly pissed at myself for my level of security. I am lazy and
I have given up; I dont believe that the powers that be have anything
to gain by listening or altering my messages.
Winston Smiths aren't we all.
rev
ps iPhone mobile security? like a piece of black tape and a zip lock bag?
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 2:56 AM, Patrick Schmidt
<psbschmidt(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Speaking about corporate cellphones where you cant
take out the
battery and dont know who
controls the mic:
Would be awesome if the Hacker Community finally comes up with Open
Hardware Mobile Phones and awesome Open Hardware Cameras.
2013/3/16, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net>et>:
--
Bike Smut is poised to unveil its 6th year of sex-positive human-powered porno!
Turning TriXXX around North America!
https://twitter.com/#!/BikeSmut
------------------------------------------------------
erotic elegance and ergonomic efficiency
------------------- Bike Smut --------------------
Yo's-
There's a big stinking skunk in the room, that everyone seems to miss,
including a lot of people at SudoRoom and other hackerspaces:
The biggest threat to freedom & privacy is not the government, law
enforcement, the intelligence agencies, etc.
The biggest threat is the corporate sector. And many of us are
willingly serving ourselves up to them on a silver platter, with
condiments included, and dragging our friends into it with something
less than fully informed consent.
What government can do to you with the data they collect: Prosecute you
for a crime or disappear you to Gitmo. Some day, though at present it's
merely a paranoid fantasy, perhaps order a drone strike to shoot you on
the street.
What the private sector can do to you: Get you fired from your job,
deny you the ability to get another job, or an apartment, a mortgage,
health insurance, a bank account, or plain-vanilla consumer credit.
Which set of consequences is more likely to happen to you? Which set of
consequences causes more fear today? Which set of consequences
realistically makes you look over your shoulder?
On a day-to-day basis, are Americans talking about their fear of going
to prison, or about their fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes,
losing their health coverage, etc.? Do you know anyone who has a kid?
Ask them whether they're more afraid of going to prison or of losing
their job and the roof over their head.
Round-ups of dissidents make news. Political prosecutions make news.
Suicides of young guys who were being aggressively prosecuted for
hacking, make news.
Someone getting fired (or not getting hired) because their boss found an
"objectionable" comment by them somewhere online, or an embarrassing
picture of them on Facebook, doesn't make the news.
As far as the media and public opinion are concerned, losing your job
and losing the roof over your head don't make you a persecuted
dissident, they make you a "loser." And when you rant about getting
fired or denied an apartment because of your politics or your lifestyle,
you're not just a "loser" but a "whiny loser."
There is no more effective means of enforcing servile conformity than to
offer mundane rewards and punishments, that individuals internalize.
There is no more effective way to get people to comply, than to sell
compliance as "convenience." As a science fiction character of mine
said in the 80s, "Why put a person in prison, when you can put prison in
the person?"
But there's something even more insidious about this.
It creates a culture of internalized compliance, conformity, and
submission. A culture where dissent and nonconformity are "tolerated"
(because overt repression would trigger more dissent), but where the
vast majority does what is expected of them. A culture where today
people say "privacy is obsolete" and "there is no more privacy," a
culture that's one step away from "freedom is obsolete."
The biggest risk is not that you'll personally be targeted, lose your
job, and end up homeless. The biggest risk is that the culture as a
whole won't give a fiddler's fig about those who are quietly
dispossessed, because everyone is too busy falling in line to chase the
latest consumer baubles, or to keep from being eaten by the latest
economic alligators.
Big Data is the feed-in to that system.
Do you have any idea of the totality of tracking that's going on now?
Keyword search "flash cookies" or go to http://www.eff.org and search
their website for their write-ups about 'em. Look up "super cookies"
and "LSOs" or "local stored objects" while you're at it.
Depending on your operating system & browser, take a close look at the
files & folders on your machine that store these things. Open the
folders and watch what happens when you turn up the privacy settings on
your browser, or click the options to clear your cache, cookies,
browsing history, etc. What you'll see is that these f---ing bugs
instantly regenerate themselves: like cockroaches they are almost
impossible to kill off entirely.
Using open-source OS & browsers doesn't fix this. You can write a
custom script to route them to dev null and it won't stop them. They
are designed to thwart your security measures and keep on sending data
to their owners, no matter what you do. They are arguably a criminal
violation of anti-hacking statutes because they circumvent security
measures on machines, but so far nobody has raised a lawsuit about that
(I have pestered the folks I know at EFF about this and will keep doing
so, but their docket is pretty jammed as it is). "Privacy policies"
that destroy privacy are arguably "contracts of adhesion" that are not
enforceable. And yet....
Everywhere you go online, everything you do online, is being collected
with a degree of completeness that would cause you to crap your pants if
you knew how far it goes.
The ostensible goal is to sell advertising. But I have a question:
what's the actual return on investment for that? How many goods &
services are actually sold because advertisers can "target" you for
"personalized" messages? How often have you bought something because
you got a targeted ad? I'm willing to bet: not enough to justify the
amount of money being spent on all the tracking, spying, and digital
flashlights shoved up our collective colon.
The purveyors of all this neo-surveillance are basically scamming the
business world when they say it's "necessary" to "remain
competitive"
and all that nonsense. One could make the same claim for telemarketing,
and the only ones who get rich on it are the telemarketers themselves.
So here's where fellow Sudoers and other friendly folks end up turning
themselves into FOOD for Big Data, and dragging their friends into it
with something less than informed consent:
Facebook, Google, texting, and smartphones. And very soon, Verizon and
other cable TV services, about which more some other time, keyphrase
"watch you cuddle."
Most of us here despise Facebook, except we'll give someone a pass for
using it if they're a public or quasi-public figure who wants to use it
for publicity purposes.
But very very many of us here use Gmail addresses and Google Voice
telephone numbers.
Google is the paradigm case of Big Data. Even NSA is envious of Google,
and NSA recently adopted a Google database system for use in their new
facility in Utah.
When you use GMail or Google Voice, you are being subjected to the same
kind of keyword-recognition collection & analysis system that NSA uses
for intercepting overseas traffic. The difference is that you don't get
to vote for their boss every four years.
When the only way to reach someone by email is at their GMail address,
and the only way to reach them by phone is by calling their Google Voice
number, they are effectively saying to their friends: "If you want to
write to me or talk to me, you have to submit to intensive
surveillance." If you value the friendship, you submit. Or you say
nothing on the phone and nothing in email, other than "let's meet in
person." Thereby throwing away all the potential value of over a
century of communications technology.
What Ithiel de Sola Pool called "technologies of freedom" in 1983, have
become technologies of control that rival _1984_. As Winston Smith said
to O'Brien, when O'Brien switched off the telescreen in his apartment,
"You can turn it off!", and O'Brien replied, "We can turn it off. We
have that privilege." Try taking the battery out of an iPhone. Try
taking the battery out of the forthcoming, and ironically named,
"iWatch." They watch. You can't turn it off. Interesting, that. So
when you hang out with someone who's carrying an iPhone, wearing an
iWatch, or worst of all Google Goggles, once again, you're submitting.
Facebook is a surveillance machine. Google is a surveillance machine.
Twitter is not only a surveillance machine, it was designed as an
intelligence collection platform. I know someone who developed intel
collection & analysis software for use on Twitter. I'll tell that story
in person. "Texting" in general, like Twitter, is an intel collection
platform. And "smartphones" are surveillance devices you carry around
with you. Do you really trust software you can't inspect?, that
controls a camera, a microphone, and a GPS tracker, that you carry
everywhere you go?
There used to be a pretty strong cultural attitude among geeks, hackers,
etc., that using AOL for email, was for losers. Cool People didn't go
anywhere near AOL.
AOL's big sin was censorship. They tried to "moderate" their little
corner of cyberspace. In the end they failed, and at this point (I had
to check that they still exist at all) they are nothing more than
another dumb "aggregator" page.
But make no mistake about this: Surveillance IS censorship.
When people are being watched, they behave differently. They submit,
they conform, they comply.
And in the end, "convenience" is a dumb-ass excuse for compliance.
-G.
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
7:05 p.m.
New subject: Freedom of name: Skunk topics: not lazy, exhausted.
Yo's -
(Thanks Revphil)
First, quickly: mobile security: black tape & a ziploc bag aren't
sufficient.
For one thing, they don't stop the GPS device from stalking you wherever
you go. For another, you'd be surprised how easy it is to recover audio
even through a plastic bag or a layer of clothing. or example San
Francisco's MUNI buses all have audio & video recording, and they can
pinpoint desired conversations even on a noisy bus. This I know from
having read the manufacturer's specs. Better tech is needed, see my
preceding email.
Second, re. "I am lazy and I have given up." No, you're not lazy.
You're probably just exhausted, probably on chronic low-level overload
most of the time. And like the movie character trying to outrun the
monster, who finally says to his/her companions, "I can't keep up, just
go on without me...", exhaustion looks like "giving up."
How much sleep does each of us get every night? Anything less than
seven hours each night, and we're sleep deprived, running on empty, and
cognitively impaired in comparison to when we get enough sleep. Sleep
dep is pandemic in our society: most Americans are getting less than
6-1/2 hours a night, racking up a chronic sleep deficit, health impacts,
and cognitive impacts.
Notice all the ads for new mattresses? They try to get people to
believe that buying an expensive mattress will give them "a better
night's sleep". That's BS of course, but it's also an example of how
the economy feeds off misery. Overwork, media overload, every waking
minute filled up doing something that _makes money for someone else_,
gradually turn us into sheep, cows, and pigs, lined up to be fleeced,
milked, and porked.
And to keep feeding the Growth Gods, those waking hours have to be
stretched and extended and colonized further. It's no surprise that one
of the Shiny Things on the near horizon is a pill to do away with the
need for sleep altogether. In the end it'll have nasty side-effects,
but it will create ever more opportunities to be kept busy at work and
busy consuming, and the side-effects will create more opportunities to
sell more stuff to the New Zombies.
What to do about that:
Take back your time. Don't feed the parasites & predators, even if they
give you a pleasant little buzz for doing so. Think of the time people
spend on Facebook or playing Angry Birds or whatever, or chasing the
latest media download. Most of us have a bunch of little time-wasters
that add up, that we can overthrow and throw out. Consuming less is an
act of revolt against the oligarchy, and an act of self-empowerment.
Consume less, sleep more. Make it a point to get at least seven hours a
night, every night. Your brain will perk up, you'll get your work done
more efficiently, and you'll have more time for whatever you choose.
Solidarity is a better buzz than media. Solidarity is empowerment.
This is the biggest strength of hackerspaces: getting a bunch of smart
clever nonconformists and dissidents together in one place. The next
step comes when stuff we build gets out there to the world and starts
changing lives.
Solitude is good for solidarity. Time alone to just sit & think is
incredibly valuable. It's the way you de-colonize your headspace.
People are usually more creative than they give themselves credit for.
Solitude and solidarity foster creativity.
The sheer joy of solidarity, solitude, and creativity, is better than
anything the oligarchy can offer us in exchange for submission. It's
the the best high there is, it's subversive as hell, it's sustainable,
and it gives you back the energy to outrun the monsters and ultimately
to defeat them.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-17-Sun 1:44 PM, revphil wrote:
Thanks for the essay! I didn't expect to read it
to the end but your
rant was right on target.
I went to the EFF's presentation at NoiseBridge yesterday and tho I
might have personally benefited more from learning about 3d Printers I
feel slightly pissed at myself for my level of security. I am lazy and
I have given up; I dont believe that the powers that be have anything
to gain by listening or altering my messages.
Winston Smiths aren't we all.
rev
ps iPhone mobile security? like a piece of black tape and a zip lock bag?
On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 2:56 AM, Patrick Schmidt
<psbschmidt(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
Speaking about corporate cellphones where you
cant take out the
battery and dont know who
controls the mic:
Would be awesome if the Hacker Community finally comes up with Open
Hardware Mobile Phones and awesome Open Hardware Cameras.
2013/3/16, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net>et>:
Yo's-
There's a big stinking skunk in the room, that everyone seems to miss,
including a lot of people at SudoRoom and other hackerspaces:
The biggest threat to freedom & privacy is not the government, law
enforcement, the intelligence agencies, etc.
The biggest threat is the corporate sector. And many of us are
willingly serving ourselves up to them on a silver platter, with
condiments included, and dragging our friends into it with something
less than fully informed consent.
What government can do to you with the data they collect: Prosecute you
for a crime or disappear you to Gitmo. Some day, though at present it's
merely a paranoid fantasy, perhaps order a drone strike to shoot you on
the street.
What the private sector can do to you: Get you fired from your job,
deny you the ability to get another job, or an apartment, a mortgage,
health insurance, a bank account, or plain-vanilla consumer credit.
Which set of consequences is more likely to happen to you? Which set of
consequences causes more fear today? Which set of consequences
realistically makes you look over your shoulder?
On a day-to-day basis, are Americans talking about their fear of going
to prison, or about their fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes,
losing their health coverage, etc.? Do you know anyone who has a kid?
Ask them whether they're more afraid of going to prison or of losing
their job and the roof over their head.
Round-ups of dissidents make news. Political prosecutions make news.
Suicides of young guys who were being aggressively prosecuted for
hacking, make news.
Someone getting fired (or not getting hired) because their boss found an
"objectionable" comment by them somewhere online, or an embarrassing
picture of them on Facebook, doesn't make the news.
As far as the media and public opinion are concerned, losing your job
and losing the roof over your head don't make you a persecuted
dissident, they make you a "loser." And when you rant about getting
fired or denied an apartment because of your politics or your lifestyle,
you're not just a "loser" but a "whiny loser."
There is no more effective means of enforcing servile conformity than to
offer mundane rewards and punishments, that individuals internalize.
There is no more effective way to get people to comply, than to sell
compliance as "convenience." As a science fiction character of mine
said in the 80s, "Why put a person in prison, when you can put prison in
the person?"
But there's something even more insidious about this.
It creates a culture of internalized compliance, conformity, and
submission. A culture where dissent and nonconformity are "tolerated"
(because overt repression would trigger more dissent), but where the
vast majority does what is expected of them. A culture where today
people say "privacy is obsolete" and "there is no more privacy," a
culture that's one step away from "freedom is obsolete."
The biggest risk is not that you'll personally be targeted, lose your
job, and end up homeless. The biggest risk is that the culture as a
whole won't give a fiddler's fig about those who are quietly
dispossessed, because everyone is too busy falling in line to chase the
latest consumer baubles, or to keep from being eaten by the latest
economic alligators.
Big Data is the feed-in to that system.
Do you have any idea of the totality of tracking that's going on now?
Keyword search "flash cookies" or go to http://www.eff.org and search
their website for their write-ups about 'em. Look up "super cookies"
and "LSOs" or "local stored objects" while you're at it.
Depending on your operating system & browser, take a close look at the
files & folders on your machine that store these things. Open the
folders and watch what happens when you turn up the privacy settings on
your browser, or click the options to clear your cache, cookies,
browsing history, etc. What you'll see is that these f---ing bugs
instantly regenerate themselves: like cockroaches they are almost
impossible to kill off entirely.
Using open-source OS & browsers doesn't fix this. You can write a
custom script to route them to dev null and it won't stop them. They
are designed to thwart your security measures and keep on sending data
to their owners, no matter what you do. They are arguably a criminal
violation of anti-hacking statutes because they circumvent security
measures on machines, but so far nobody has raised a lawsuit about that
(I have pestered the folks I know at EFF about this and will keep doing
so, but their docket is pretty jammed as it is). "Privacy policies"
that destroy privacy are arguably "contracts of adhesion" that are not
enforceable. And yet....
Everywhere you go online, everything you do online, is being collected
with a degree of completeness that would cause you to crap your pants if
you knew how far it goes.
The ostensible goal is to sell advertising. But I have a question:
what's the actual return on investment for that? How many goods &
services are actually sold because advertisers can "target" you for
"personalized" messages? How often have you bought something because
you got a targeted ad? I'm willing to bet: not enough to justify the
amount of money being spent on all the tracking, spying, and digital
flashlights shoved up our collective colon.
The purveyors of all this neo-surveillance are basically scamming the
business world when they say it's "necessary" to "remain
competitive"
and all that nonsense. One could make the same claim for telemarketing,
and the only ones who get rich on it are the telemarketers themselves.
So here's where fellow Sudoers and other friendly folks end up turning
themselves into FOOD for Big Data, and dragging their friends into it
with something less than informed consent:
Facebook, Google, texting, and smartphones. And very soon, Verizon and
other cable TV services, about which more some other time, keyphrase
"watch you cuddle."
Most of us here despise Facebook, except we'll give someone a pass for
using it if they're a public or quasi-public figure who wants to use it
for publicity purposes.
But very very many of us here use Gmail addresses and Google Voice
telephone numbers.
Google is the paradigm case of Big Data. Even NSA is envious of Google,
and NSA recently adopted a Google database system for use in their new
facility in Utah.
When you use GMail or Google Voice, you are being subjected to the same
kind of keyword-recognition collection & analysis system that NSA uses
for intercepting overseas traffic. The difference is that you don't get
to vote for their boss every four years.
When the only way to reach someone by email is at their GMail address,
and the only way to reach them by phone is by calling their Google Voice
number, they are effectively saying to their friends: "If you want to
write to me or talk to me, you have to submit to intensive
surveillance." If you value the friendship, you submit. Or you say
nothing on the phone and nothing in email, other than "let's meet in
person." Thereby throwing away all the potential value of over a
century of communications technology.
What Ithiel de Sola Pool called "technologies of freedom" in 1983, have
become technologies of control that rival _1984_. As Winston Smith said
to O'Brien, when O'Brien switched off the telescreen in his apartment,
"You can turn it off!", and O'Brien replied, "We can turn it off. We
have that privilege." Try taking the battery out of an iPhone. Try
taking the battery out of the forthcoming, and ironically named,
"iWatch." They watch. You can't turn it off. Interesting, that. So
when you hang out with someone who's carrying an iPhone, wearing an
iWatch, or worst of all Google Goggles, once again, you're submitting.
Facebook is a surveillance machine. Google is a surveillance machine.
Twitter is not only a surveillance machine, it was designed as an
intelligence collection platform. I know someone who developed intel
collection & analysis software for use on Twitter. I'll tell that story
in person. "Texting" in general, like Twitter, is an intel collection
platform. And "smartphones" are surveillance devices you carry around
with you. Do you really trust software you can't inspect?, that
controls a camera, a microphone, and a GPS tracker, that you carry
everywhere you go?
There used to be a pretty strong cultural attitude among geeks, hackers,
etc., that using AOL for email, was for losers. Cool People didn't go
anywhere near AOL.
AOL's big sin was censorship. They tried to "moderate" their little
corner of cyberspace. In the end they failed, and at this point (I had
to check that they still exist at all) they are nothing more than
another dumb "aggregator" page.
But make no mistake about this: Surveillance IS censorship.
When people are being watched, they behave differently. They submit,
they conform, they comply.
And in the end, "convenience" is a dumb-ass excuse for compliance.
-G.
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
_______________________________________________
sudo-discuss mailing list
sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
6:19 p.m.
New subject: "Skunk" topic cont'd: better tech & better usage
Yo's-
(Thanks Patrick!)
Three things are needed. One is better tech. Two is smarter usage.
Three is the courage of our convictions.
1) Better tech:
YES we need better cellphone tech. For example:
= Open source source code, with detailed instructions for compiling it
and using it. (Full and explicit documentation should enable an average
person to follow the steps successfully.)
= Downloadable object code: compiled from the source code by trusted
entities such as EFF, and downloadable from their website, along with
detailed instructions for using it. (This will bring people onboard who
can't compile from source.)
= Devices that are pre-loaded with the new operating system and
utilities. These would need to have some means by which users could
connect to trusted sites to verify what was actually on their devices.
(This will make the project accessible to the vast mass of humans who
aren't geeks.)
= While we're at it, the software should include cryptography and
steganography, and improved voice fidelity.
= And the software should be cross-platform: for existing mobile
devices, for laptops with headsets, for desktops with landline phones.
Make it universal and it will spread.
About hardware: YES we need our own hardware, from a trusted source.
= A "ringer" that cannot be subverted into a microphone. This part is
easy: an oscillator and resonant buzzer. (Musical ringtones are
needless nonsense that facilitate using speakers as microphones.)
= Physical switches that cut off the mic, the speaker, the camera, the
GPS sensor, and the inertial sensor (inertial sensors are another
surveillance modality, details on request). The way to cut off a sensor
is by a) cutting off its power, _and_ b) shorting its signal output to
ground (both steps are required).
On landline phones these functions are collectively known as the
"hookswitch," and you can physically inspect it to see that it is in
fact cutting off the speech circuit when the receiver is on the hook.
Combining all the "sensor OFF" functions into a single switch similar to
a landline "hookswitch" would require a "ten-pole / double-throw"
switch: probably difficult to source that component, but not impossible.
= Another physical switch that cuts off power entirely.
With this combination of switches, you would have the choice of a)
putting the device on "standby" such that it can receive calls but
doesn't do anything else until you turn on the "hookswitch", or b)
turning the device OFF altogether. "On - Standby - Off." Simple and
straightforward.
These switches could easily be built into the edge of the device,
between two ridges that protect them from being damaged. I have a
design in mind for this but don't have the time to post a diagram at
this moment. Alternately they could be placed under a hinged cover on
the device.
= No "supercapacitors" on the circuit board, that could keep some of the
functions running even when the battery is out, for example functions
that are usable for remotely-triggered surveillance. It would not
surprise me if supercaps are being used in mobile devices for this
purpose right now, for GPS recording, and audio recording (the content
from which would automatically upload when the device is powered up
again). Without supercaps on the board, battery-out means device-OFF.
= We have, in the local hackerspace community, people who have been
highly successful in the business of making innovative hardware. We
need to discuss this with them. This will lead to a product that can be
mass produced.
Probably the resulting device will be thicker and slightly larger than
present devices. That's a small price to pay for privacy and the
freedom that comes with privacy. We can do this!
2) Smarter usage:
Embedded surveillance has become "popular" because it gives people
things they want: for example the ability to get voicemail messages
transcribed to text in email, so they can "skim" rambling messages more
quickly. (In fact, figuring out a garbled text translation of a
voicemail message takes longer than listening to the actual audio, but
the marketing makes people believe it's faster.)
This leads to two things:
One is, more better tech. I was just speaking with a friend who'll
probably post a comment to this thread, and he suggested that we already
have most or all of the open-source tools needed to replace Google
Docs. We can develop open-source, freedom-and-privacy-enhanced,
replacements for most of the things people use that are connected to the
"predict-you-and-control-you" surveillance economy.
The other is, smarter usage.
Use email headers intelligently: when a topic of conversation changes,
revise the header accordingly, to make it easier for people to find the
new topic. This is something I've gotten used to doing for work
purposes. It's easy, it just takes a little thought, and thought is
what differentiates live humans from dead ones.
Keep voicemail messages concise so people can actually listen to the
audio rather than depending on a surveillance-machine to transcribe to
text. This also eliminates the potential for automated transcription
errors and the hassles they cause. (Voicemail-to-email should deliver
the actual audio clip to the recipient, so they can choose whether to
dial up their mailbox in the regular way, or listen to their messages on
their computer or other device. I can demonstrate this in actual use if
anyone's interested.)
Also for email: Specify priority in the header, e.g. say "urgent" or
"routine," or whatever, and when receiving email, always read stuff
that's marked for higher priority.
Also for email: Say enough to make your meaning clear the first time.
If someone has to write back to you to ask what you meant, you left
stuff out. For example, "Let's get dinner after the meeting" is vague:
which meeting, when? "Let's get dinner after the general meeting this
Wednesday night" is specific enough to be clear the first time. Leaving
stuff out imposes a burden on the other person: to write back and ask
what you meant, and to hold up their time and attention waiting for a
reply (it also imposes a burden on yourself to reply to their
questions), and contributes to the "overload" factor.
One of the key reasons people do dumb things in their personal
communications (like not responding to voicemail and email) is because
they're on chronic low-level overload. Part of this is due to dumb
usage practices such as vagueness, that gnaw away at attention with
needless back-and-forth. Part of it is because the oligarchy tries to
keep us saturated with MEDIA (the oligarchy's messages and content) all
the time, and very often we happily obey. When our heads are stuffed
full of MEDIA, we don't have time or patience for ordinary communication
from other people. The answer to this is, reduce the overload: _consume
less media, make more room for the people in your life_. Also make
more room for solitude and reflection, thinking and daydreaming, and
"doing nothing" while your mental batteries recharge themselves.
3) The courage of our convictions: WE can build a new infrastructure
if we choose.
A new internet, new voice and data utilities, new software and apps, new
hardware where needed.
Robust, resilient, freedom and privacy enhanced, and at the same time
safer from predators & parasites and more secure to run critical
infrastructure such as the power grid.
WE have the talent to do this. It will start small but if it's any good
it will spread. We can create right-livelihood jobs doing it, that the
oligarchy can't buy out later.
Go back and read some of the early 1980s stuff about the electronic
frontier, the open horizon of freedom and community, the vast promise of
technology to liberate people in so many ways. What happened since that
time was that the parasites & predators took over, to the point where
the "technologies of freedom" became "the technologies of
convenience"
and thereby "the technologies of control."
WE do not have to submit. WE can liberate the digital commons.
-G.
=====
On 13-03-17-Sun 2:56 AM, Patrick Schmidt wrote:
Speaking about corporate cellphones where you cant
take out the
battery and dont know who
controls the mic:
Would be awesome if the Hacker Community finally comes up with Open
Hardware Mobile Phones and awesome Open Hardware Cameras.
2013/3/16, Anon195714 <anon195714(a)sbcglobal.net>et>:
>
> Yo's-
>
> There's a big stinking skunk in the room, that everyone seems to miss,
> including a lot of people at SudoRoom and other hackerspaces:
>
> The biggest threat to freedom & privacy is not the government, law
> enforcement, the intelligence agencies, etc.
>
> The biggest threat is the corporate sector. And many of us are
> willingly serving ourselves up to them on a silver platter, with
> condiments included, and dragging our friends into it with something
> less than fully informed consent.
>
> What government can do to you with the data they collect: Prosecute you
> for a crime or disappear you to Gitmo. Some day, though at present it's
> merely a paranoid fantasy, perhaps order a drone strike to shoot you on
> the street.
>
> What the private sector can do to you: Get you fired from your job,
> deny you the ability to get another job, or an apartment, a mortgage,
> health insurance, a bank account, or plain-vanilla consumer credit.
>
> Which set of consequences is more likely to happen to you? Which set of
> consequences causes more fear today? Which set of consequences
> realistically makes you look over your shoulder?
>
> On a day-to-day basis, are Americans talking about their fear of going
> to prison, or about their fear of losing their jobs, losing their homes,
> losing their health coverage, etc.? Do you know anyone who has a kid?
> Ask them whether they're more afraid of going to prison or of losing
> their job and the roof over their head.
>
> Round-ups of dissidents make news. Political prosecutions make news.
> Suicides of young guys who were being aggressively prosecuted for
> hacking, make news.
>
> Someone getting fired (or not getting hired) because their boss found an
> "objectionable" comment by them somewhere online, or an embarrassing
> picture of them on Facebook, doesn't make the news.
>
> As far as the media and public opinion are concerned, losing your job
> and losing the roof over your head don't make you a persecuted
> dissident, they make you a "loser." And when you rant about getting
> fired or denied an apartment because of your politics or your lifestyle,
> you're not just a "loser" but a "whiny loser."
>
> There is no more effective means of enforcing servile conformity than to
> offer mundane rewards and punishments, that individuals internalize.
> There is no more effective way to get people to comply, than to sell
> compliance as "convenience." As a science fiction character of mine
> said in the 80s, "Why put a person in prison, when you can put prison in
> the person?"
>
> But there's something even more insidious about this.
>
> It creates a culture of internalized compliance, conformity, and
> submission. A culture where dissent and nonconformity are "tolerated"
> (because overt repression would trigger more dissent), but where the
> vast majority does what is expected of them. A culture where today
> people say "privacy is obsolete" and "there is no more privacy,"
a
> culture that's one step away from "freedom is obsolete."
>
> The biggest risk is not that you'll personally be targeted, lose your
> job, and end up homeless. The biggest risk is that the culture as a
> whole won't give a fiddler's fig about those who are quietly
> dispossessed, because everyone is too busy falling in line to chase the
> latest consumer baubles, or to keep from being eaten by the latest
> economic alligators.
>
> Big Data is the feed-in to that system.
>
> Do you have any idea of the totality of tracking that's going on now?
> Keyword search "flash cookies" or go to http://www.eff.org and search
> their website for their write-ups about 'em. Look up "super cookies"
> and "LSOs" or "local stored objects" while you're at it.
>
> Depending on your operating system & browser, take a close look at the
> files & folders on your machine that store these things. Open the
> folders and watch what happens when you turn up the privacy settings on
> your browser, or click the options to clear your cache, cookies,
> browsing history, etc. What you'll see is that these f---ing bugs
> instantly regenerate themselves: like cockroaches they are almost
> impossible to kill off entirely.
>
> Using open-source OS & browsers doesn't fix this. You can write a
> custom script to route them to dev null and it won't stop them. They
> are designed to thwart your security measures and keep on sending data
> to their owners, no matter what you do. They are arguably a criminal
> violation of anti-hacking statutes because they circumvent security
> measures on machines, but so far nobody has raised a lawsuit about that
> (I have pestered the folks I know at EFF about this and will keep doing
> so, but their docket is pretty jammed as it is). "Privacy policies"
> that destroy privacy are arguably "contracts of adhesion" that are not
> enforceable. And yet....
>
> Everywhere you go online, everything you do online, is being collected
> with a degree of completeness that would cause you to crap your pants if
> you knew how far it goes.
>
> The ostensible goal is to sell advertising. But I have a question:
> what's the actual return on investment for that? How many goods &
> services are actually sold because advertisers can "target" you for
> "personalized" messages? How often have you bought something because
> you got a targeted ad? I'm willing to bet: not enough to justify the
> amount of money being spent on all the tracking, spying, and digital
> flashlights shoved up our collective colon.
>
> The purveyors of all this neo-surveillance are basically scamming the
> business world when they say it's "necessary" to "remain
competitive"
> and all that nonsense. One could make the same claim for telemarketing,
> and the only ones who get rich on it are the telemarketers themselves.
>
> So here's where fellow Sudoers and other friendly folks end up turning
> themselves into FOOD for Big Data, and dragging their friends into it
> with something less than informed consent:
>
> Facebook, Google, texting, and smartphones. And very soon, Verizon and
> other cable TV services, about which more some other time, keyphrase
> "watch you cuddle."
>
> Most of us here despise Facebook, except we'll give someone a pass for
> using it if they're a public or quasi-public figure who wants to use it
> for publicity purposes.
>
> But very very many of us here use Gmail addresses and Google Voice
> telephone numbers.
>
> Google is the paradigm case of Big Data. Even NSA is envious of Google,
> and NSA recently adopted a Google database system for use in their new
> facility in Utah.
>
> When you use GMail or Google Voice, you are being subjected to the same
> kind of keyword-recognition collection & analysis system that NSA uses
> for intercepting overseas traffic. The difference is that you don't get
> to vote for their boss every four years.
>
> When the only way to reach someone by email is at their GMail address,
> and the only way to reach them by phone is by calling their Google Voice
> number, they are effectively saying to their friends: "If you want to
> write to me or talk to me, you have to submit to intensive
> surveillance." If you value the friendship, you submit. Or you say
> nothing on the phone and nothing in email, other than "let's meet in
> person." Thereby throwing away all the potential value of over a
> century of communications technology.
>
> What Ithiel de Sola Pool called "technologies of freedom" in 1983, have
> become technologies of control that rival _1984_. As Winston Smith said
> to O'Brien, when O'Brien switched off the telescreen in his apartment,
> "You can turn it off!", and O'Brien replied, "We can turn it off.
We
> have that privilege." Try taking the battery out of an iPhone. Try
> taking the battery out of the forthcoming, and ironically named,
> "iWatch." They watch. You can't turn it off. Interesting, that. So
> when you hang out with someone who's carrying an iPhone, wearing an
> iWatch, or worst of all Google Goggles, once again, you're submitting.
>
> Facebook is a surveillance machine. Google is a surveillance machine.
> Twitter is not only a surveillance machine, it was designed as an
> intelligence collection platform. I know someone who developed intel
> collection & analysis software for use on Twitter. I'll tell that story
> in person. "Texting" in general, like Twitter, is an intel collection
> platform. And "smartphones" are surveillance devices you carry around
> with you. Do you really trust software you can't inspect?, that
> controls a camera, a microphone, and a GPS tracker, that you carry
> everywhere you go?
>
> There used to be a pretty strong cultural attitude among geeks, hackers,
> etc., that using AOL for email, was for losers. Cool People didn't go
> anywhere near AOL.
>
> AOL's big sin was censorship. They tried to "moderate" their little
> corner of cyberspace. In the end they failed, and at this point (I had
> to check that they still exist at all) they are nothing more than
> another dumb "aggregator" page.
>
> But make no mistake about this: Surveillance IS censorship.
>
> When people are being watched, they behave differently. They submit,
> they conform, they comply.
>
> And in the end, "convenience" is a dumb-ass excuse for compliance.
>
> -G.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> sudo-discuss(a)lists.sudoroom.org
> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>
4077
days inactive
4085
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11 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
aestetix -
Andrew -
Anon195714 -
hol＠gaskill.com -
Patrick Schmidt -
revphil