Dominion’s Results Tally & Reporting User Guide | One America News Network
https://www.oann.com/dominion/
Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2020/1003 - Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Founded Assumptions
https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1003
Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography | Quanta Magazine
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-achieve-crown-jewel-of-cryptography-20201110/
Bitcoin and the End of History - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDKQulqVCQg
Before the Web: The 1980s Dream of a Free and Borderless Virtual World – Reason.com
Cypherpunks write code. Says so right there in Reason magazine. :-) https://reason.com/video/before-the-web-the-1980s-dream-of-a-free-and-borderless-virtual-world/ God, everyone looks old now... Cheers, RAH
The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be 'Falsified' Is a Myth - Scientific American
Uh... so Marxianism and Freudianism are true, then, Dr. Popper? Pull the other leg. It has bells on it. ———- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-idea-that-a-scientific-theory-can-be-falsified-is-a-myth/?fbclid=IwAR38_gUgnF97qFzcm6EJZMTnmtdXX0_usl2vg8qbI2hWeEUFP43ubqsodo4 The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be 'Falsified' Is a Myth - Scientific American Mano SinghamSeptember 7, 2020 J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” Since the so-called “Cambrian explosion” of 500 million years ago marks the earliest appearance in the fossil record of complex animals, finding mammal fossils that predate them would falsify the theory. But would it really? The Haldane story, though apocryphal, is one of many in the scientific folklore that suggest that falsification is the defining characteristic of science. As expressed by astrophysicist Mario Livio in his book Brilliant Blunders: "[E]ver since the seminal work of philosopher of science Karl Popper, for a scientific theory to be worthy of its name, it has to be falsifiable by experiments or observations. This requirement has become the foundation of the ‘scientific method.’” Advertisement But the field known as science studies (comprising the history, philosophy and sociology of science) has shown that falsification cannot work even in principle. This is because an experimental result is not a simple fact obtained directly from nature. Identifying and dating Haldane's bone involves using many other theories from diverse fields, including physics, chemistry and geology. Similarly, a theoretical prediction is never the product of a single theory but also requires using many other theories. When a “theoretical” prediction disagrees with “experimental” data, what this tells us is that that there is a disagreement between two sets of theories, so we cannot say that any particular theory is falsified. Fortunately, falsification—or any other philosophy of science—is not necessary for the actual practice of science. The physicist Paul Dirac was right when he said, "Philosophy will never lead to important discoveries. It is just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made.” Actual scientific history reveals that scientists break all the rules all the time, including falsification. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn noted, Newton's laws were retained despite the fact that they were contradicted for decades by the motions of the perihelion of Mercury and the perigee of the moon. It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength, not any philosophy. Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment dictates and adopt whatever works. Unfortunately, some scientists have disparaged the entire field of science studies, claiming that it was undermining public confidence in science by denying that scientific theories were objectively true. This is a mistake since science studies play vital roles in two areas. The first is that it gives scientists a much richer understanding of their discipline. As Einstein said: "So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is—in my opinion—the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." The actual story of how science evolves results in inspiring more confidence in science, not less. The second is that this knowledge equips people to better argue against antiscience forces that use the same strategy over and over again, whether it is about the dangers of tobacco, climate change, vaccinations or evolution. Their goal is to exploit the slivers of doubt and discrepant results that always exist in science in order to challenge the consensus views of scientific experts. They fund and report their own results that go counter to the scientific consensus in this or that narrow area and then argue that they have falsified the consensus. In their book Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway say that for these groups “[t]he goal was to fight science with science—or at least with the gaps and uncertainties in existing science, and with scientific research that could be used to deflect attention from the main event.” Science studies provide supporters of science with better arguments to combat these critics, by showing that the strength of scientific conclusions arises beca
The threat of privacy
http://www.kahnfrance.com/cmk/The%20threat%20of%20privacy%20distribution%20version.pdf The Threat of Privacy By Charles M. Kahn1 Like artists, we academics want to believe that if one of our works doesn’t get enough attention it’s because we’re ahead of our time. I’d like to pretend that everything I’ve written is pathbreaking, and will eventually be recognized for its true importance. But I have to admit that there are really only a couple of cases where I can say with hindsight that something I wrote has been ahead of its time. One of them2 is a paper written with Jamie McAndrews and Will Roberds, published in 2005, and titled “Money is Privacy.” We wrote it partly as a response to Narayana Kocherlakota’s famous paper “Money is Memory,” which could be taken as arguing that cash is essentially a record‐keeping device, tracking who was a net creditor and who a net debtor to society with respect to resources provided or consumed. The implication was that if it became easy to keep credit records directly, cash could wither away. In our paper we argued instead that a key role of cash was its ability to protect the purchaser’s identity. So we predicted that, even while the reductions in costs of record keeping and increases in the speed of data transmission were expanding the usage of credit‐ and deposit‐account‐ based payments arrangements, cash would survive. Because the desire for privacy would always generate demand for cash, it would be a mistake—and ultimately futile—to attempt to abolish it. At the time, people were attuned to many of the problems of privacy, but there had not yet been a clear recognized link between the value of privacy and the role of payments systems. (Remember, bitcoin was only released in 2009). [...] 1 Keynote address at “Financial Market Infrastructure Conference II: New Thinking in a New Era” at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, 7‐8 June 2017. 2 The other was my dissertation, back in 1980. It was on liquidity and the pricing of illiquid assets. At that time, no one thought this was an important issue in finance: financial markets were liquid; everybody “knew” that. So the work went nowhere. Oh well.
Counterinsurgency. It’s what’s for Portland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Algiers
We’re all #cypherpunks now…
https://nypost.com/2020/07/14/navajo-nation-suggests-code-talkers-as-washington-football-team-name/?utm_source=like2buy.curalate.com&crl8_id=656e8f50-0996-44d9-99f6-b07e3cd4deee
Renowned Cryptographer Says His Patent Was an Obstacle for Hal Finney
https://cointelegraph.com/news/renowned-cryptographer-says-his-patent-was-an-obstacle-for-hal-finney Renowned Cryptographer Says His Patent Was an Obstacle for Hal Finney Okamoto explains why his “electronic cash” patent may have presented obstacles to Hal Finney’s plans to make his own electronic currency. Jul 04, 2020 Okamoto explains why his “electronic cash” patent may have presented obstacles to Hal Finney’s plans to make his own electronic currency. Tatsuaki Okamoto explains why his “electronic cash” patent might have presented an obstacle to Hal Finney in his ambition to create his own electronic currency. Six key patents Sometime before Dec. 6, 2004, Hal Finney did a search in a patent database on “blind-signature based cash systems”. On his site he posted a list of six such patents: “This might be useful for those considering implementing electronic cash.” Four of the patents are authored by David Chaum, the other two by Okamoto and his colleague at Nippon Telegraph Kazuo Ohta. Ecash patents by Dr. Okamoto & his Nippon Telegraph colleague Dr. Kazuo Ohta. Source: finney.org (via WayBack Machine) Okamoto currently serves as director of the Cryptography & Information Security Lab at NTT Research and holds over 100 patents. We asked him to explain why his patent might have presented an obstacle to Hal Finney and other cypherpunks in their ambition of creating a decentralized currency, considering that his patent involves an intermediary. Okamoto’s ecash & Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Okamoto kindly prepared diagrams elucidating the differences between the ecash system outlined in his patent and Bitcoin (BTC). Diagram: Electronic Cash described in Patent 49775595. Source: NTT Research Diagram: Bitcoin. Source: NTT Research Both solutions use public keys as pseudonymous identities and private keys to authorize transactions. However, in Okamoto’s proposal, a trusted party varies transactions, whereas Bitcoin is trustless, with all nodes verifying transactions. Trustless system — no trivial achievement Considering this key difference, one might ponder — why Finney and other pioneers were so paranoid about patent infringement? One obvious answer is that Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin proposal was the first successful framework for a trustless electronic cash system. Coming up with it was not a trivial achievement; almost 30 years passed between the introduction of Chaum’s DigiCash and Nakamoto’s Bitcoin. Did “Okamoto” give ideas to Finney for “Nakamoto?” Many believe Finney to be Satoshi Nakamoto or at least part of the team that was behind the moniker. Besides his interests, expertise and early Bitcoin involvement, another fact strongly supports this theory — being a neighbor of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. Considering that Google cannot return a single query for Satoshi Nakamoto before the Bitcoin proposal was publicized, this coincidence is eerie. If Finney, indeed was behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, his familiarity with the works of Tatsuaki Okamoto might have also played a role in the choice of the alias. Okamoto told Cointelegraph that he was never a part of the famous cryptographic mailing lists and did not know Hal Finney personally.
Re: Any Cypherpunk there ?
> On Jun 26, 2020, at 8:28 PM, Shawn K. Quinn wrote: > > the ideal form of the cypherpunk Was Tim May. I suggest you go find him in the Usenet and cypherpunk archives, and read what he said himself. Come back after you’ve uncurled your hair. Cheers, RAH Who was lit on fire a time or two here, himself, Itellyawhut…
