Tag: Technology

Another Reason to Encrypt Your Data

In an interesting development a federal magistrate in Wisconsin has refused to order a suspect to decrypt his hard drive citing the Firth Amendment:

The issue is front and center as a federal magistrate is refusing to order a Wisconsin computer scientist to decrypt his data that the authorities seized from kiddie-porn suspect Jeffrey Feldman. The reason is simple: The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination protects even those suspected of unsavory crimes, according to U.S. Magistrate William Callahan Jr. of Wisconsin, who wrote:

This is a close call, but I conclude that Feldman’s act of production, which would necessarily require his using a password of some type to decrypt the storage device, would be tantamount to telling the government something it does not already know with ‘reasonably particularity’—namely, that Feldman has personal access to and control over the encrypted storage devices. Accordingly, in my opinion, Fifth Amendment protection is available to Feldman. Stated another way, ordering Feldman to decrypt the storage devices would be in violation of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. (.pdf)

The issue of whether or not being forced to decrypt information is a violation of the Firth Amendment is still being debated. In Colorado, for example, a woman was ordered by a court to decrypt her hard drive and the decision was upheld by a federal appeals court. I’m sure this decision will be appealed and that’s when this battle will become more interesting. Still, for the time being, this ruling gives yet another reason to encrypt your data. It may offer you some legal protection against the watchful eye of the state.

I Love the Future

The future we live in is great. In my pocket is a device that is able to give me access to the collected knowledge of mankind from almost anywhere in the world. My holster contains a firearm that has a frame made up mostly of plastic with sights that glow in the dark. My truck has oil in it that was developed entirely in a laboratory because dead dinosaurs aren’t thermally stable enough for my likings. The best part about the future though is that it’s constantly evolving. Within a few weeks, as Robb Allen pointed out, gun control will be a thing of the past:

After a panel on how copyright affects the 3D printing industry, he confirmed to Mashable what he had already hinted at before: that what was once unthinkable — a gun entirely made of 3D-printed parts — is actually right around the corner.

Will it work? Wilson thinks it will, and it won’t be just a one-shot wonder it will be able to fire a few shots before melting or breaking.

Wilson didn’t want to reveal too much about what could become the world’s first fully 3D-printed gun, saying he will make the actual announcement soon. He did reveal some details, however.

The gun will be made of 12 parts, all printed in ABS+, a very sturdy type of thermoplastic. There might be, perhaps, just one small metal part — a firing pin. While Wilson and his team are still designing the weapon, it won’t be a reproduction of an existing firearm, but instead a custom design.

Once an entire firearm can be manufactured on a 3D printer gun control will be dead. There is no way to stop the development of a tool when anybody can easily acquire the knowledge and means to create it. As I said, 3D printer technology will only become better and as it does the ability to create more complex devices, such as firearms, will become easier. At this point it’s merely a matter of time until the entire concept of gun control becomes nothing more than a pipe dream of tyrants.

More Thoughts on CISPA

HR3523, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which passed the House today, has been making news as of late. If passed into law, the bill would allow government agencies to share data with one another and allow private corporations to share data with the state without concerning themselves with any contractual obligations:

At that Committee meeting (1:01:45), the bill’s chief sponsor Chairman Rogers emphatically repeated his earlier assertions that CISPA wouldn’t breach private contracts in response to questions from Jared Polis:

Polis: Why wouldn’t it work to leave it up, getting back to the contract part, and I think again there may be a series of amendments to do this, if a company feels, if it’s voluntary for companies, why not allow them the discretion to enter into agreements with their customers that would allow them to share the information? …

Rogers: I think those companies should make those choices on their own. They develop their own contracts. I think they should develop their own contracts. They should enforce their own contracts in the way they do now in civil law. I don’t know why we want to get in that business.

[…]

And yet… for all Rogers’ bluster, CISPA moots private contracts—and House Republican leadership won’t fix the problem, even when five of their GOP colleagues offer a simple, elegant fix.

This is the same stubborn refusal to accept criticism and absorb new information that brought us SOPA, PIPA and a host of other ill-conceived attempts to regulate the Internet. It’s the very opposite of what should be the cardinal virtue of Internet policy: humility. Tinkering with the always-changing Internet is hard work. But it’s even harder when you stuff your fingers in your ears and chant “Lalalala, I can’t hear you.”

I think this brings up an important point that is often lost on people. As it currently stands most people rely on the service provider to protect their privacy. People who use services such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. assume that those companies will prevent prying eyes from viewing unauthorized third-parties. This is a poor assumption for multiple reasons. First, most service providers make their money off of selling their customers’ information. There is an assumption that such information is anonymized to a point but there is no guarantee. I believe the conflict of interest is obvious. Reason number two is that even if a service provider does protect your privacy there is no guarantee that unauthorized third-parties won’t gain access by bypassing implemented security measures. The third reason is that customer information is often an asset that is sold off when a company becomes insolvent. If your e-mail provider were to enter bankruptcy they may be required to sell you information as part of their asset sale. Fourth, the state reserves the right to render contractual agreements irrelevant with the mere issuance of a subpoena. CISPA, ultimately, isn’t granting private entities the ability to violate their contractual agreements without legal consequences, it merely removes the requirement that a subpoena be issued before the contract can be violated.

The reason I advocate crypto-anarchy is because it’s a solution to all of the above mentioned problems. Imagine a world where everybody encrypted their e-mails. While the e-mails may be stored on an e-mail provider’s server the data would be unusable to them or unauthorized third-parties. The same applies to encrypted instant messages, web page requests, etc. Anonymizing tools can prevent service providers and anybody with access to their data from identifying your person or your location. Having encrypted data from an unknown person makes decryption difficult since you don’t know who to coerce the required keys out of.

Even if CISPA is passed there are many ways for your information to fall into unauthorized hands. Crypto-anarchy renders all of these threats irrelevant while begging politicians to not pass CISPA doesn’t. Solve all of the problems instead of a single minor one, use cryptographic tools today.

IBM Executives are Heading to Washington to Lobby in Favor of CISPA

Speaking of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), it appears that executives from IBM are heading to Washington DC to lobby in favor of passing the bill:

Nearly 200 senior IBM executives are flying into Washington to press for the passage of a controversial cybersecurity bill that will come up for a vote in the House this week.

The IBM executives will pound the pavement on Capitol Hill Monday and Tuesday, holding nearly 300 meetings with lawmakers and staff. Over the course of those two days, their mission is to convince lawmakers to back a bill that’s intended to make it easier for industry and government to share information about cyber threats with each other in real time.

IBM has a history of helping governments collect data on their citizens. Considering the consequences of their last marriage with the state I should be surprised by this news. But we all know that there is big money in selling customer data to the state. It’s always disappointing when a technology company sells computer users down the river. Fortunately CISPA is irrelevant thanks to cryptography technology.

Bitcoin Mining isn’t an Environmental Disaster

I don’t know what possesses people who don’t understand the advancement of technology to write about the advancement of technology. Bitcoin has been headlining many news sites recently. Most of the headlines discuss the recent crash but Mark Gimein had decided to write about another aspect of Bitcoin, the energy requirements of Bitcoin mining. According to Mr. Gimein Bitcoin mining is an environmental disaster:

Most people aren’t used to thinking in terms of the energy it takes to solve math problems; a few minutes of Excel may not take much energy. But make the problems complicated enough, and things change. “Mining” Bitcoins takes so much processor power that it’s often done with specialized computers optimized for rapid repetitive calculations. So how much power can that take?

Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour (a little higher than the U.S. average, lower than some high cost areas like California). That, of course, is in addition to the money devoted to buying and building the mining rigs. The site estimates the profits from the day of mining at about $681,000, based on the current value of Bitcoins. So mining, at least for the moment, is a lucrative business.

The trade-off here is that as virtual value is created, real-world value is used up. About 982 megawatt hours a day, to be exact. That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a Large Hadron Collider. If the dreams of Bitcoin proponents are realized, and the currency is adopted for widespread commerce, the power demands of bitcoin mines would rise dramatically.

What Mr. Gimein fails to understand, or at least mention, is that Bitcoin is in its infancy and, like any technology in its infancy, is still running inefficiently. New technologies always start off rough around the edges and improve over time. A majority of Bitcoin mining was originally performed using computer processors. Today a majority of Bitcoin mining is done using graphics cards. Both processors and graphics cards, especially the powerful ones that were and are used by Bitcoin miners, can require a great deal of power. However the technology is improving.

First, let’s understand the the current trend in computing is power efficiency. More computing is being performed on mobile platforms, which need to run off of energy stored in batteries. A mobile phone, for example, doesn’t do much good if it can only run for an hour before the battery goes dead. This is why manufacturers are sinking huge amounts of research and development dollars into making more power efficient chips. Consumers always want more. They want more powerful devices and better battery life. Manufacturers want to make consumers happy because making consumers happy is what nets manufacturers a profit. So we are seeing more powerful processors and graphics processors that also consume less power.

The age of wearable computing is also beginning. Google has introduced Glass, the Pebble watch is selling very well, and there are rumors that Apple is planning to introduce a watch of its own. Wearable computers are even smaller than mobile phones, meaning there isn’t as much room for batteries. When wearable computers begin to take off the demand for even more power efficient chips will increase.

Today Bitcoin mining may take 982 megawatt hours a day. Tomorrow it will likely take less. Not just because of more power efficiency processors and graphics cards, but because current efforts are being focused on Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). ASICs are chips designed to perform a specific task. This contrasts with general purpose computing chips such as the processor and graphics card (which are more specialized than processors but still capable of performing other tasks) found in your computer. Because of this ASICs can be designed to use less power. The linked article linked to Butterfly Lab’s website. Butterfly Labs is purporting to build ASICs for Bitcoin mining (I say purported because I know several people who have ordered from Butterfly Labs but have so far received no hardware). ASCIMiner is another ASIC aimed at Bitcoin mining and is powered off of a standard USB port.

Mr. Gimein must believe that Bitcoin miners like sinking vast amounts of money into buying electricity. If that was the case then Bitcoin miners wouldn’t be looking for more efficient methods of mining. But Mr. Gimein’s apparent belief is incorrect, Bitcoin miners don’t like spending great deals of money on electricity, which is why money is being put into developing more efficient mining hardware. Doing more with less has been the trend in human technology. When somebody makes estimations based on current technology they are doomed to fail. One must also predict how technology will advance. The electricity required in Bitcoin mining will decrease as the technology matures.

More Thoughts on the Bitcoin Crash

It appears that Bitcoin hasn’t hit the floor yet. This news has left many members of the Bitcoin community scrounging for a scapegoat. Reading various Bitcoin communities (although the /r/bitcoin subreddit has provided me with the most entertainment) it seems the recent devaluation of Bitcoin was caused by automated trades performed by bots, fake libertarians (I guess you can only be a libertarian if you invest heavily in Bitcoin), and a secret cabal of central banks. While the last scapegoat sounds the most plausible of the three (those central banks are ruthless bastards) I think the community is ignoring the most likely cause: Bitcoin is a new technology.

Bitcoin really is the first notable crypto-currency. Although previous crypto-currenciies have existed none of them enjoyed the prominence that Bitcoin enjoys today. Most people alive today have lived their entire lives using state controlled fiat currencies. Bitcoin is the opposite of what we call money today. It’s a decentralized currency that cannot be inflated past a certain point (only 21 million Bitcoin will ever exist). The decentralized nature of the currency means no single entity can wield monopoly control over it. It is also the first free-market monetary system that most of us have experienced. In other words, Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea and, like all revolutionary ideas, nobody can predict how it will, or won’t, change things.

Speaking in software terms the concept of Bitcoin (not to be mistaken for the network, clients, or services) is in the alpha stage of development. People participating in the Bitcoin community should understand that they are testers and should expect to find copious amounts of bugs that need to be worked out. Is Bitcoin vulnerable to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks? If so, that must be corrected. Is Bitcoin too reliant on single points of failure? If so, that must be corrected. Is it too hard for the average person to acquire Bitcoin or use it in everyday transactions? If so, that must be correct. Growing pains are unavoidable when working with a technology that few, if any, understand the ramifications of.

Instead of playing the blame game I believe the Bitcoin community would be better served by noting the failure and thinking of methods to utilized the currency’s main features to overcome that failure. For instance, I’ve seen a lot of blamed aimed at Mt.Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency, why was one exchange allowed to gain so much influence over the exchange rate of the currency? Having a single point of failure is always a bad idea. Trusted members of the Bitcoin community should start developing more exchanges. More Bitcoin exchanges would mean more resiliency as it would be difficult for attackers to bring down or manipulate all of them simultaneously. Members of the Bitcoin network should put more work into developing easy methods for the average person to buy Bitcoin. In today’s world people like the convenience of credit cards. Credit cards, due to the ability of a purchaser to perform a charge back and the inability to recover sold Bitcoin, don’t work well for purchasing Bitcoin so some other convenient method must be created. The idea of Bitcoin Automated Teller Machines (ATM) is a good start, but they need to be located in high traffic areas such as grocery stores and gas stations. Until people can acquire Bitcoin as easily as they can buy things with their credit cards they won’t adopt the currency.

Another feature that should be leveraged more is the mostly anonymous nature of the currency. I’ve seen a lot of comments from Bitcoin advocates trying to refute the claim that Bitcoin is most heavily used in the drug trade. Stop that. Embrace it! Expound the fact that Bitcoin is used by drug dealers and purchasers because transactions cannot easily be tied to physical individuals. As the world governments continue to wring more and more money out of their people those people are going to look for a place to hide their wealth. A currency that is outside of the state’s control, can be used to store wealth in a mostly anonymous fashion, and allows individuals to perform transactions in a manner that that state can’t record for taxing or prosecution purposes should be huge and will be necessary as the state’s rate of expropriation increases. By denying that Bitcoin is used for “black” market purchases members of the Bitcoin community are downplaying its most valuable feature. Don’t try to control its image, let its image develop freely.

As an agorist and a crypto-anarchist I want to see Bitcoin succeed. In order to succeed I believe the Bitcoin community needs to understand that Bitcoin is a revolutionary idea, will have growing pains, and must be rid of state dogmas against the “black” market. Trying to shoehorn it into mainstream monetary and political principles will relegate it to always being an interesting idea that never gets widely adopted.

IRS Claims They can Read Your E-Mail Without a Warrant; They Can’t (Unless You Let Them)

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) believes that they can read your e-mails without acquiring a warrant:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people’s emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.

[…]

In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy.

It’s fortunate that we live in a world where what the IRS thinks and what is actually true are two different things. While the Fourth Amendment doesn’t offer any protection from warrantless searches OpenPGP does. Enigmail is a plugin for Thunderbird that lets you easily encrypt your e-mail with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). By encrypting your e-mail you can ensure only the intended recipient(s) can read it. Even if the IRS obtains a warrant to copy your e-mails from your service provider’s servers it won’t do them any good because they won’t be able to read those e-mails.

The IRS, or any other state agency, can only read your e-mail if you let them.

The Great Bitcoin Crash

Yesterday my prediction based on the utmost scientific research came true. Bitcoin, which has seen a remarkable increase in value compared to dollars, began to crash. Supposedly the cause of this crash was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack:

We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is falling because of apparent distributed denial of service attacks on Mt. Gox and Bitstamp. A denial of service attack happens when an attacker overwhelms a target with external requests, so that it can’t honor regular requests from legitimate users.

All commodities are vulnerable to some amount of manipulation and Bitcoin is no different. The sudden drop in value demonstrates a potential exploit that can be used to make a great deal of money off of Bitcoin. Let’s hypothesize that the DDoS attack was planned some months back. Planning to execute a DDoS attack against several prominent Bitcoin trading sites individuals decided to first buy a large number of Bitcoin as the then current price and then move to manipulate the price by bringing the currency to the media’s attention. After generating a good deal of interest those same individuals begin to trade some Bitcoin for larger amounts of dollars, which raises the high point trade value. Seeing an increase in the high point trade value people uninvolved with the plan begin trading at higher prices. Eventually the system becomes a sort of Ouroboros, a self-feeding cycle that causes the price of Bitcoin to continuously rise. Once the value of Bitcoin has been manipulated high enough the manipulators sell off all of their Bitcoin and begin their DDoS attack. With the most prominent Bitcoin trading sites down the perceived value of Bitcoin tumbles along with it. After that the cycle can begin again. Buy low, manipulate the price higher, instigate a DDoS attack to drop the price, buy low, and so on.

The scenario I just explained is hypothetical, I’m not implying that it is fact. But the scenario is a possibility.

It will be interesting to see what the price of Bitcoin does over the next several days. Will is drop in price? Will it return to the pre-DDoS high? Will it climb even higher?

3D Printed AK Magazine

Via The Firearm Blog I learned of some great news, Defense Distributed has successfully printed an AK magazine:

Since all but the most expensive 3D printers lack the ability to work with metal (that will change) you still have to supply a spring but the rest of the magazine can be printed. You can count this as yet another nail in the coffin of gun control. Advancements like this effectively render New York and Colorado’s recent magazine bans meaningless.

Head over to Defense Distributed’s website and download the plans.

Microsoft and the NYPD are Partnering to Spy on You

Fascism, the marriage between the state and private entities, is a lucrative business for both parties. Sadly, unlike mutual exchange, fascism involves more than the exchangers, it involves everybody who falls under the tyranny of the state, and those people always suffer from the unholy union. Last year Microsoft and the New York Police Department (NYPD) announced their partnership in expanding the police state. The two collaborated to create the Domain Awareness System, a system that integrates city-wide surveillance technology to assist the state in spying on the general populace. As it turns out this marriage stands to be very profitable for both parties as other cities are looking to implement the system:

A unique public-private partnership that joined gut-level police acumen with advanced computer algorithms is proceeding toward two goals that rarely coincide: The policing system is making New York safer and it will also make money for the city, which is marketing it to other jurisdictions.

In the six months since the Domain Awareness System was unveiled, officials of Microsoft, which designed the system with the New York Police Department, said they have been surprised by the response and are actively negotiating with a number of prospective buyers, whom Microsoft declined to identify.

“The interest from the United States has come from smaller municipalities, from sheriff’s departments, and police chiefs from several major cities,” said Dave Mosher, vice president of Microsoft Services. “Outside the U.S., large sporting events have approached us, and also law enforcement — people who are interested in providing public security.”

Buyers would pay to access the software (at least several million dollars and more depending on the size of the jurisdiction and whether specifications have to be customized). New York City will receive 30 percent of the gross revenues from the sale of the system and access to any innovations developed for new customers. The revenue will be directed to counterterrorism and crime prevention programs.

The state loves surveillance because it offers a method to expropriate wealth from the general populace without having to hire and pay additional enforcers. I’m not even slightly surprised that Microsoft and the NYPD have been met with such high demand. Let’s face it, most municipalities are hurting for money. The only way those books can be shored up is if more wealth can be expropriated from the general populace. In order to increase expropriation the governments of those municipalities must increase taxes, increase the number of issued citations, or both. Technology like the Domain Awareness System assists in increasing the number of issued citations because it allows enforcers to see more taxable vices (speeding, parking violations, etc.) and record evidence for a court case if a citation is challenged.

There is some goods news. Surveillance systems are vulnerable to a type of exploit known as smashing cameras and audio recording devices.