Notices by Micah Lee 🔑 (micahflee@mastodon.social), page 11

inspired by a recent @legind gram and an internet outage at home, i got carried away and spent a bit of time this week rigging up a fallback internet connection with an LTE modem, a calyx sprint SIM, and the pfsense box i've been using as a router. (the primary connection is fiber.)

i have no idea why i get carried away and do these things, there is almost literally no point to this?

Someone texted this to me and I thought it was an incredibly apt description of bitcoin

We just published a Snowden document from 2006 about NSA successfully breaking the encryption and spying on VPNs run by Al Jazeera, the Iraqi military, airlines and reservation systems, and other "high potential" targets https://theintercept.com/2018/08/15/nsa-vpn-hack-al-jazeera-sidtoday/

Here's a recording of my talk at Hackers on Planet Earth about many of thr awesome things you can do with Qubes OS: the operating system that can protect you even if you get hacked https://livestream.com/internetsociety2/hope/videos/178431606

I was looking forward to speaking about Qubes at HOPE, then checking out a bunch of cool hacker talks, learning things, hanging out with friends.

I think my talk went well, but the rest of the weekend was entirely derailed by a group of fascists and the fact that the organizers refused to enforce their Code of Conduct and ban them

@micahflee @raucao incidentally, today @OCCRP published an article on just how that kind of lies get published, and by whom: https://www.occrp.org/en/spooksandspin/the-secret-players-behind-macedonias-fake-news-sites

The whole Spooks and Spin project is well worth a read: https://www.occrp.org/en/spooksandspin/

I just published an article that describes in technical detail how Russia executed their attacks on the US election, how they got caught, and what capabilities the US appears to have.

What Mueller's Latest Indictment Reveals About Russian and U.S. Spycraft
https://theintercept.com/2018/07/18/mueller-indictment-russian-hackers/

@paulfree14 @schlink @Purism that's an interesting decision to not base it on Android Open Source Project! The Signal server and protocol is actually totally open: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

But it is centralized and doesn't federate. However, that also means it's way simpler to create an account, find other users, and to use yourself. I like Riot too, but I don't think I'll stop using Signal any time soon.

German police raided homes of members of a privacy group that runs Tor exit nodes.

Their excuse was an unrelated blog called for violence at a right-wing event, this blog uses Riseup email, and the privacy group handles European donations for Riseup.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-police-raid-homes-of-tor-linked-groups-board-members/

@Maltimore there isn't a live implementation yet, but Katzenpost looks quite far along https://katzenpost.mixnetworks.org/

Super interesting paper and presentation on recent mix-net research. They propose a new anonymous communication system called Loopix which is secure against global passive adversaries (which Tor isn't secure against) https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity17/technical-sessions/presentation/piotrowska