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Apple vs FBI: The unspoken Truth on Encryption

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While one can admire Apple for ‘defending’ it’s customers privacy, while also benefiting with the positive advertising. It is probably a moot, and hollow victory as the NSA and the CIA have already broken Apple security.

Not that it shouldn’t be of high importance, the resources required to do the cracking of any particular extraction of an encrypted message sent with a iPhone would most likely exceed the budget of a small country. Which is exactly the point of encryption, making it hard, and expensive to decrypt. Imagine the joviality at the NSA/CIA after the hours of decryption, that the ‘Important’ message turns out to be a high priority, top secret Cookie Recipe from you mothers cookbook.

And thereby is the unspoken truth of encryption the first one is this: you must either decrypt everything, to find what is being said, because if you can only choose strategic messages, choosing the right ones are tantamount.

During WWII monitoring enemy communication was aided by observing the frequency of communication traffic, when frequency increased, something important was being communicated. Modern military communications is continuous and unbroken, transmitting meaningless message traffic, and therefore not highlighting any particular message in the traffic stream that would be required to be decrypted. This would now be a requirement to decrypt everything, in the military traffic stream.

The second Truth is this; The assumption that you can decrypt all the messages is the hight of arrogance and ignorance. Anyone, yes anyone can create an encryption that will be impossible for a machine of any sort to decrypt, and many of these can be hidden to the point that even a human expert directly observing the message can not decipher.

Imagine hiding messages in the continuous email stream called Spam, which now constitutes more that 80% of all email traffic?

Thoughts like this keep the NSA/CIA/FBI up nights, and no matter what Bull Shit they might tell you about the need to have back doors and encryption keys it will NEVER catch all the potential secret messages that terrorists might choose to pass to each other.

Because the simplest of truths: It isn’t possible.

RTE Political Debates 2016

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The only thing that I hear from the ‘Debates’ were that Parties were running against Parties. There was no debate about anyone being held responsible for decisions, no one responsible for any outcomes. It’s the Party’s choice. The Party that Failed, the Party that succeeded, the party that brought you X or Y.

We the people are voting on, and for PEOPLE, not parties. We know that Kenny never fulfilled any campaign promises, but it’s not his fault, he was doing what his party wanted. Sinn Fein has killed people in the past, therefore the people who now represent Sinn Fein are all murderers, because Sinn Fein, the party, murdered.

There are criminals who have been CONVICTED dozens of times, that do not get painted as a criminal when next they come to trial, why does ANY party get painted with past party issues, by past party members, when it was the members who committed them.

This lame attempt by our politicians to redirect blame to an anonymous ‘Party’ is another attempt to shed personal responsibility for the outcomes of bad decisions and choices. Like cheap used auto dealer, I have to talk to my party…er manager about that deal.

I hold Kenny & Noonan responsible for Water Charges, and paying off the bond holders, not Fine Gael, and Labor.

But if you want to play party politics, fine, Kenny, Noonan you have lost my vote for ANY Fine Gael politician, Labor too, as you had no guts to stand up for your ‘Party’ position, you also will fail to get a vote.

Water Charges

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For those who haven’t got it yet, the Water charges are just another ‘Stealth’ Tax. It was NEVER intended to fund water services. It was an excuse to tax the people of Ireland, suggested to them by the Troikia to pay for the Bank Bailout.

If you think that 0.005€ per liter is magiclly derived from average water usage, to arrive at ~280€ per month you would have been shocked if it had been 1.00€ per liter to arrive at that same monthly figure had the usage data been lower.

Hiding in plain sight

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In this age of ‘Big Data’ the masters are the ones who hide in plain sight. If you generate billions of media bits that must be parsed by the powers that be, the devil really is in the details.

During a stint in a fraud unit I learned that the trick wasn’t to read all the monitored data, but to build patterns of ‘normal’ for everyone monitored. If the patterned changed then something had changed, and an investigator was assigned.

Another article I keep remembering is an interview with with a ‘Ninja Assissan’ who was quoted as;

” I never sleep in the same bed two nights in a row (he had 5 bedrooms), and he never ate the same thing for breakfast (though he always ate what he wanted) ”

Hence the pattern he would generate would always be random, and therefore a consistent repeated event would be considered abnormal and a ‘red flag’ that something wasn’t normal.

So to hide, and maintain privacy would be to either overwhelm the bit watchers, or develop such a random lifestyle as to make normal pattern matching methods useless.

anyone want to be a Ninja Assissan?

UPDATE: Pattern Reconition

UPDATE 2: Global consumer data broker plans to reveal your data

If you Can’t dazzle them with data, baffle them with Bull Shit!!!

UPDATE 3: Just so you know: US government is hoovering data from Apple, Microsoft and Google servers

The Banking Crisis is Our Fault!

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I heard all the arguments, and if I were in a position to actually have made the decisions, or been allowed to tender an opinion on the actions taken. I know I would have made different choices. But in the end;

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BANKING CRISIS!


We the people of Ireland are personally responsible for the crisis, for WE voted on the corrupt and idiotic government, the bad bureaucracy and bribed banked owned politicians who put us into this position. AS IN PERIOD!

WE ARE RESPONSIBLE!


There is no getting around it, so stop talking about a banking crisis, it’s a crisis of a democratic majority more concerned with trifling personalities, and historical artifacts that have no basis in fact. A Nonsensical political system that reenforces the rich, and dumps the poor and middle classes.

The 71 Fianna Fáil Royals, does not Democracy Make.

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The 71 Fianna Fáil Party Royalty who are being allowed to decide on the issue of wither we remove a Corrupt and disgraceful Taoiseach, Brian Cowen is not a Democracy. It only represents the swaggering elitist thugs that have manhandled the Irish state into the ashcan of Europe and pissed away the sovereignty of Ireland and are therefore NOT entitled to make that decision.

An immediate General Election should be called and the ‘Heave’ should be given to the entire Fianna Fáil Gang by the people of Ireland in a true Democratic election.

Underground War – Whistle Blowers strike back.

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I may be the last to see this, a war, underground and undeclared, but a war. The opponents are a bit undefined but there is a clear and escalating combat in the world. I’m not talking about Terrorists, (although the establishment who is under assault may declare their attackers as such) I am talking about the the established order, The Multi-Nationals, the Big Press, Governments, Military establishments, Religious organizations. The big anonymous bodies that have been abusing their positions to detriment everyone else.

On the opposing side, are all the little people, groups and oppressed, or the perceived oppressed. Your fellow ‘pissed off’ worker setting next to you, who will explode in a fountain of Whistle blowing. A venting of frustration that will result in the next big internet explosion.

The WikiLeaks is merely the first oozing pustule on the face of the corporeal Corporations of the world. The World of Blogging has for many years undermined the world press both broadcast and print to the point that now the majority of the population now refer to the Internet for real news rather than the handful of corporation owned ‘News’ services.

Control has now slipped out of the hands of those who for years have managed the information flow. Evidence of this ‘management’ appears almost daily in the presentations of ignorance passed off as ‘News’. And where ‘Fair and Balanced’ openly bribe governments to maintain control, religious organizations openly attempt to promote such myths as Creationism at the scientific Truth.

The tide has turned, and the failing newspapers are only the start. Watch for more WikiLeaks and Whistle Blower sites springing up, more Lawsuits more Smear campaigns as the giant attempts to swat the Whistleblowers who are biting it to death.

The Real cause of the BP oil Spill

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Not being one to believe in wild conspiracy theories, (Ok, so I read them sometimes) here is one that almost makes sense (almost).

The BP Oil spill was sabotage by U.S. Oil companies trying to eliminate BP from bidding on U.S. offshore Oil drilling contracts!

and the less believable part..

The sabotage was performed on the oil rig through Microsoft Windows software that was used to control the valves. The cyber-attack on the rig was executed from onshore.

UPDATE: Maybe not so strange @JoeGarde just sent me these links I’m sure you’ll remember this at the time http://bit.ly/9BDCze there’s also discussion about NSA and Win 7 http://bit.ly/bfFmEE

UPDATE 2: This is getting bad Social-engineering contest reveals secret BP info

The Press is facilitating a Fianna Fáil Ploy

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If you haven’t heard there is a vote in The Dáil on Tuesday, A No Confidence Vote against the Fianna Fáil Government. But listening to RTE and the Newspapers, you would only hear about Fine Gael frontbenchers ousting Kenny . What? No! We are voting AGAINST Fianna Fáil ! Where did all the kerfuffle about Kenny come about. In a word Fianna Fáil! It’s a ploy augmented by the gullible and lazy press to deflect attention away from the Tuesday No Confidence Vote. A lame attempt to displace attention away from their criminal activities which created the Irish Banking Crisis and to make a mockery of the Vote.

Fianna Fáil to fund criminal Pension Managers

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Fianna Fáil is now preparing to force every working man into funding Pension Funds that have been losing money every day. In other words they are funneling 8% of everyones paycheck into a black hole where there are no controls on pension fund managers. These incompetent Pension fund managers are allowed to lose money without regard to their customers. And there is NO need, you can earn interest on a pension WITHOUT risk. In fact this should be the number one requirement. Instead this is a gift to the criminal behavior of Pension manager. Should a regulation be put in place to guarantee that funds placed into pensions will never be less than the value of the investment. These crooks would scatter back under the rocks where they came out from. And Fianna Fáil would lose some more of their brown envelopes.

(The employee is forced to give them 4% and the employer is forced to reduce the employee’s paycheck by 4% to sent along with the employee’s to net the Pension thieves 8%)

UPDATE: The employee will only lose 6% in his pay slip as the the employer only has to add 2% probably paid as a benefit. This will create less jobs, and put more people on the Dole.

Irish Banks to ripoff NAMA

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That headline isn’t really news, at least to the people of Ireland. And only the, very disconnected, Irish Government believe that their spinning of any other message has changed that public attitude.

But here is another one, Rent, the very nature of the overinflated rents, which are driving companies out of business. This has only one value, and that is to the Banks which are utilizing the higher rents to increase the apparent value of their holding before passing them on to NAMA. In any other country, this is called Fraud

Accounting fraud
In order to hide serious financial problems, some businesses have been known to use fraudulent bookkeeping to overstate sales and income, inflate the worth of the company’s assets or state a profit when the company is operating at a loss. These tampered records are then used to seek investment in the company’s bond or security issues or to make fraudulent loan applications in a final attempt to obtain more money to delay the inevitable collapse of an unprofitable or mismanaged firm.

While this deceit may be well know to many, it was new to be. I could not understand why anyone would increase rents which were driving out tenants. Or how the rents were still overinflated with all the empty property’s currently on the markets. This more or less points to a second issue, that of Price Fixing and is, in reality, another for form anti-competitive fraud.

And there is no revolution yet? I suppose the bankers can have, and eat your cake too…

Internet Privacy myths

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One of the enduring myths of the internet is the one involving privacy. This article on CNN titled U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google takes umbrage at the notion that everyones email is secret and private. And while this myth might comfort many, the truth is that email was NEVER private. Every email host, every email relay was able, and in fact, completely open to reading, scanning and snooping, by man-in-the-middle processes and furthermore always has been since the beginning of the internet. And even if everyone was using https or ssh with their email clients while connected to their mail server, it did not encrypt the contents of the email. It may have minimized the likelihood of it being read in the data stream, but unless you were in the habit of encrypting your email with PGP or some other cypher your email and hence your ‘Privacy’ is negligible, hence, the privacy myth.

And while on the CNN article the discussions brought up the same old saw that governments HAD to have backdoors to snoop on email communications to prevent crime and terrorism without the concern that at no time has it proved itself in practice. Anyone wishing to sent communication, and have it stay private can do so, even in the face of a dedicated snoop. Anyone who had even browsed an encryption textbook can create a completely uncrackable code, and I mean uncrackable by anyone, by any means and present their messages in plain text in emails. Hacking them by any government is merely security theater and fundamentally has NO value.

If you seek ‘privacy’ stop sending anything through the internet unless it is encrypted by at least PGP (if not something more substantial). The only thing Google has lost in this privacy issue is the trust of their users to protect their email ‘publications’ on the internet. Now everyone will know that they have another recipient to all their emails, in other words, all the other governments, hackers, scammers and spammers in the internet.

A reason to NOT iPhone

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I’m waiting for the first mass exploitation virus for the iPhone to arrive. With the iPhone ecosystem reaching critical mass, there can’t be much left in the way of roadblocks to prevent this. There has already been exploits that targeted ‘jail broken’ iPhones, more likely to have been created by Apple, or a fan of Apple DRM. Therefore the likelihood that a more potent virus will emerge is very high. The likely suspect, is one that exploits the ‘closed’ nature of the device, where the victim iPhone will show no indication of an infection.

Not that my chosen device is not subject to the same attacks, the Nokia N900 is also a target, but its just not as big a target as the iPhone. More or less the same argument that has been used to justify the lack of viruses on the Mac platform. I have a Mac also, and I feel safe, but not because it’s immune to viruses, it HAS been less targeted, and it has been ACTIVELY defended.

Internet Freedom of Speech

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I’m always suspicious when a company US games company sues British blogger. What is the point of elevating an obscure blogger to Internet prominence? All this law suit is doing is broadcasting the bloggers opinion further, and if the blogger’s opinions are ‘untrue’ this just makes any damages to the company worse rather than to defend their ‘reputation’.

I think they are operating under the old saw that states ‘there is no such thing as bad PR’ , or they have bribed the courts in Australia, or they are seeking a clever way to declare bankruptcy.

In any case they are seeking to destroy Internet freedom of opinion, by using the more restrictive Libel laws from another country to censor this Blogger. Why not use the Iranian courts, then they could have sought to have the Blogger put to death, or something. I’m sure the Irish Blasphemy Laws could have been used. 🙂