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EFF lies about NetNeutrality

The EFF has completely and thoroughly repudiated JP Barlow's "Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace", such as in this tweet:

TAKE ACTION: Congress is trying sneak through a dangerous amendment that will kill Net Neutrality. Call right now: https://t.co/lmObQjG49N
— EFF (@EFF) July 15, 2014

This tweet is lie. Congress can't "kill Net Neutrality" because Net Neutrality doesn't currently exist. Net Neutrality proponents don't want to maintain the status quo, but radically change the Internet, converting it from the private network it is now into a public utility, regulated by the government.

What the left-wing populists tell you about Net Neutrality is a lie. Corporations aren't doing the evil things they claim. There is no technical idea behind it like "end-to-end". Net Neutrality is just the political belief that corporations are inherently evil and that the government must run the Internet.

Internet "fast lanes" are not a bad thing. They already exist, and the Internet can't function without them. Sniff your home traffic and then traceroute every IP address your system communicates with. You'll find that 90% of you home traffic goes to a server in your local city. That's because most websites use a fast lane to the Continue reading

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JTRIG weekend projects

The Intercept has released a page of JTRIG tools and techniques. I thought I'd comment on them.

Largely, this is a long list of small projects. Few of these projects require more than a couple lines of code, or would take an average hacker more than a weekend to accomplish.

For example, there is CHANGELING, which says "Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity". That's the sort of thing you'd ask as an interview question for a cybersec company. You'd expect the candidate to produce this in 20 minutes.

Some sound like big projects, but they are in fact just leveraging existing large open-source projects. A tiny amount of scripting on top of a project like OpenBTS would deliver big, scary results, such as fuzzing GSM.

I point this out because people have the misapprehension that the intelligence services have advanced "cyber-weapons". That's not true. Instead, what's going on is like Rambo stuck in a jungle with only a knife, who can fashion anything into a weapon, from twigs to rocks. That's what you see going on here: given the existing base of open-source (and closed-source) code, cyber-warriors fashion new tools with a little bit Continue reading

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NSA: walk a mile in their shoes

While this is mostly a technical blog, our most popular posts deal with cyber-rights, supporting Snowden, Weev, and Swartz. Yet sometimes I appear to defend the NSA. People ask me why, so I thought I’d write up a response.

Most American schools force students to read the book To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s a great book for many reasons. Most people think it’s about racism, but it’s not – it’s about bigotry. Racism is just one of the forms of bigotry found in the book. The full message, repeated several times, is that we should get along with others by trying to understand their point of view.

Our society is improving with regards to racism, but other forms of bigotry are alive and well. Webster’s defines bigotry as: “obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one's own belief and opinions, with narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them”. Our society praises such bigotry. Tolerance and understanding of other opinions is condemned.

People like Glenn Greenwald, Jacob Appelbaum, and others in the ‘activist’ movement are extreme bigots. There is good reason to oppose the NSA and its leaders who have egregiously mislead the public. Yet, this is still not justification for Continue reading