We Launched a Live Brand Styleguide

DDOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
* in the context, one cannot know that the site is voluntary censored by an agency, a group or an individual and why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spamhaus_Project
vulnerability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
extortion (blackmail : ransom)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepware
ddoss intrusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProtonMail#2015_DDoS_attacks
protonmail is working with different military consortium which israeli and therefore is untrusted (ddoss protection).
ddoss pressure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackVPN
blackmail

subpoena (blackmail : ransom)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpoena
* in the context, one cannot divulge that the site or the keys are compromised
* subpoena is often used for making a pressure.

>> meltdown/spectre have nothing to do with tor

I fear that you are wrong about that, and with the indulgence of the moderator I'd like to explain why. Please bear with me.

For over a decade, LANL and other Military/Surveillance/Industrial Complex entities have been building and running supercomputer models of dozens of US cities in which the financial/physical/mental health status and near real-time movements of every resident, and their interactions with other people, with the government, and with the environment generally--- is individually modeled (with a caveat to be briefly explained below).

Supercomputer models? Of individual Americans and all their neighbors, their friends and relations? Yes.

Don't believe it because I say it, believe it because some of the people who have been running such simulations for decades are finally starting to talk.

This has never even been a secret, not really. LANL has always been happy to talk about such models when their putative goal is to model citizen movements (whether by car, bus, train, bike, or foot) in order to improve traffic flow in US cities. Because they know that most citizens will fail to perceive how the same kinds of modeling can be used for more problematic predictions.

Like trying to predict who may in future "do something wrong"--- according to the governments algorithmically specified definition of "wrong". Which can change over time. Which means that things you do today in the belief that they are not only not criminal but would not even be considered in any sense "wrong" by most of your peers, could in future be used to harm you, on the grounds that alleged dangerous consequences have become apparent (to some neural net) in the years since you innocently did the non-criminal and "not even wrong" deed. Or could be used to harm your friends. Or your children. Because algorithms love assocation, and harbor no ethical scruples about declaring guilt on the basis of association.

About a decade ago, some people involved in such supercomputer simulations began to discuss in obscure engineering publications the fact that USIC has built such models of entire nations (e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan), seeking to predict which individual citizens of those nations may be "susceptible" to ISIL/Taliban recruitment drives or to act as "lone wolves". The modelers would try killing a particular potential "problem person", and run a new simulation to see whether that decreased the effectiveness of ISIL more than it increases the ability of ISIS to recruit fresh blood by posting pictures of the "martyr". So supercomputer models not only could potentially be used to decide by algorithm who lives and who dies, they have been used that way for some time. Literally. To decide who lives and who dies. By algorithm.

Don't believe it because I say it. Believe it because Michael Hayden said it: "we kill people using metadata". He meant: using metadata fed into supercomputer simulations, with algorithmic decisions made according to the government-defined utility function value at the end of each simulation.

It ought to have been apparent that this such revelations have tended to confirm our repeated warnings that USG is targeting its own population with the same sort of modeling. Which it was.

@ LANL scientists: You know who you are. You know what you have been doing. And you surely know that things have progressed well past the point where you need to speak up, regardless to the risk to your career or your personal freedom. Think of the children. Aged 2-7.

And indeed, more recently, some of the people who have done this kind of modeling for decades are starting to talk about some of the more, shall we say, suggestive, supercomputer modeling of the US population, modeling which they have been doing for so many years:

https://www.wired.com/story/scientists-know-how-youll-respond-to-nuclea…
Scientists Know How You’ll Respond to Nuclear War—and They Have a Plan
Using an unprecedented level of data from more than 40 different sources, researchers can now make synthetic populations of entire cities.
Megan Molteni
13 Feb 2018

> The science of prediction has changed a lot [in the past decade]. Now, researchers like [former Los Alamos National Lab scientist Chris] Barrett, who directs the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, have access to an unprecedented level of data from more than 40 different sources, including smartphones, satellites, remote sensors, and census surveys. They can use it to model synthetic populations of the whole city of DC—and make these unfortunate, imaginary people experience a hypothetical blast over and over again.
> ...
> You can think of Barrett’s system as a series of virtualized representation layers. On the bottom is a series of datasets that describe the physical landscape of DC—buildings, roads, the electrical grid, water lines, hospital systems. On top of that is dynamic data, like how traffic flows around the city, surges in electrical usage, and telecommunications bandwidth. Then there’s the synthetic human population. The makeup of these e-peeps is determined by census information, mobility surveys, tourism statistics, social media networks, and smartphone data, which is calibrated down to a single city block.

LANL is quite proud of the somewhat ingenious notion of "synthetic populations", which they introduced to avoid a public outcry, because even nuclear bomb designers could appreciate that Americans would consider the revelation that they are being individually modeled inside repeated supercomputer simulations to be "creepy" and even dangerous to their civil liberties. As Molteni explains, the modelers construct populations of fake people, closely based upon real data on real people, which behave statistically just like the real populations. But as any data scientist can confirm, modelers always have to "validate" claims such as "behave statistically just like the real populations" by running side by side comparisons of simulations using the synthetic populations with simulations using the real populations.

And as I keep trying to warn Americans, LANL has all the real data on all the real people, and has
literally been running vast precrime simulations of The People (the real people) for more than a decade, at the request of the FBI. Literally. Pre-crime models. At the request of the FBI. In supercomputers. Models with model you and you and you--- and even more dangerously, your children.

> So say you’re a parent in a two-person working household with two kids under the age of 10

It's not even a secret that NCTC's target group for precrime algorithmic predictions consists of American preschoolers aged 2-7 y.o.

> living on the corner of First and Adams Streets. The synthetic family that lives at that address inside the simulation may not travel to the actual office or school or daycare buildings that your family visits every day, but somewhere on your block a family of four will do something similar at similar times of day. “They’re not you, they’re not me, they’re people in aggregate,” Barrett says. “But it’s just like the block you live in; same family structures, same activity structures, everything.”
> ...
> That’s where Barrett’s simulations really start to get interesting. In addition to information about where they live and what they do, each synthetic Washingtonite is also assigned a number of characteristics following the initial blast—how healthy they are, how mobile, what time they made their last phone call, whether they can receive an emergency broadcast. And most important, what actions they’ll take.

It's unfortunate that Molteni failed to even mention the civil liberties implications of such detailed precrime modeling, but as someone who has struggled for years to explain to reporters how "synthetic populations" work, this is a really good brief description :-/

> Not everyone is convinced that massive simulations are the best basis for formulating national policy. Lee Clarke, a sociologist at Rutgers who studies calamities, calls these sorts of preparedness plans "fantasy documents," designed to give the public a sense of comfort, but not much else. "They pretend that really catastrophic events can be controlled," he says, "when the truth of the matter is, we know that either we can't control it or there's no way to know.

I have a lot to say about nuclear war too, but that may not be relevant to Tor users (although presumably of interest to anyone who does not wish their family to be vaporized in a nuclear detonation). But precrime modeling is certainly relevant to Tor users, because if you use Tor, you are probably worried about protecting your privacy and your freedom of choice. And what could be more inimical to privacy and freedom of choice than these activities?

o collecting vast amounts of detailed information (telecommunication/websurfing/travel/financial/medical/educational/employment/family histories, social media postings and other writings, responses to "surveys" (some written under a false flag by the spooks themselves) from hundreds of government/corporate data banks,

o using this data to construct detailed supercomputer models modeling every citizen and their interaction with the environment

o "tweaking" some governmental action against some targeted group (everything from changing the timing on a particular stoplight through changing zoning laws to sentencing some child to juvie prison), rerunning the simulation, and looking for those actions which most increase the government's "utility" (as measured for example in tax revenues)

o using the results to decide how to design "influence/suasion operations" targeting Americans.

Returning to

>> meltdown/spectre have nothing to do with tor

please look back at what Chris Barrett told Meghan Solteni about

> unprecedented level of data from more than 40 different sources, including smartphones... remote sensors... the electrical grid, water lines... surges in electrical usage

Consider these facts:

o many US cities have constructed electrical power "smart grids", most of them using "smart meters" made by the Swiss multinational Landis+Gyr,

o the most popular model, the AXR-SD smart meter, has features including the following
+ two-way "gridstreamRF" radio operating at 902-928 MHz, aka "the WiFi mesh", which uses spread spectrum frequency hopping (but not encryption, apparently) to tranmit all the utility "customer energy use data" (CEUD), i.e. your power usage, to a data center,
+ two-way Zigbee radio operating at 2.4-2.5 GHZ, which apparently does use garden-variety AES encryption; this is the IoT interface which field technicians or (sometimes) residents can use to monitor their own energy use
+ can store "instantaneous" Wattage use,
+ can accept shutoff commands from the Command Center,

o technicians in the L+G Command Centers (L+G has two, in FL and KS) operate most of the grids remotely as a "managed service", including processing the data and issuing shutoff commands

o the Meltdown flaw may be particularly tempting for would-be "election meddlers" because

+ someone with any presence in the Command Center can potentially bypass all protections to issue malicious shutoff commands, to particular meters or to all meters,
+ Meltdown flaw is said to particularly affect cloud computing servers, such as the L+G Command Center servers,
+ forensics experts warn that no known forensic methods can prevent/detect/confirm a meltdown attack,
+the only reliable method for mitigating Meltdown would be to buy new CPUs once new chips become available from Intel, but many utilities have straightened budgets are may not be able to afford "remedial" purchases,
+ RU sponsored hackers in particular need not reach very far to reverse engineer L+G gear, because Mosenergo (the Moscow power utility) is one of L+G's customers, and thus have a legitimate need to know all about the cybersecurity protocols used (or not used) in L+G smart grids.

o You know that (for making/receiving voice calls) your cell phone or smart phone sends signals to nearby cell phone towers, but did you know that (for websurfing) your smart phone, laptop or other device using 2.4-2.5 GHz WiFi most likely sends out "probe request" packets several times a minute to any and all nearby "access points" (APs)?

o The Zigbee interface in the AXR-SD meters which was mentioned above can apparently be configured to act as an AP, and possibly can log the MAC identifiers of every nearby device sending probe request packets.

o USG has made arrangements with large telecoms to perform dragnet surveillance on websurfing, and can force telcos to cough up which phone connected when to which cell phone tower, but in response to customer outcry, many companies are beginning to resist offering the vast amounts of data they hold on their customers to USG, and even many local governments (e.g. West Coast cities) are resisting demands from USG for various kinds of data they hold on their own citizens.

o USG can serve L+G with NSLs etc demanding all their data, with a gag order forbidding L+G from warning their customers (the US city utilities), or even ordering L+G to secretly enable some of the more dangerous capabilities of the smart meters in order to secretly "dual-purpose" the smart grids as dragnet surveillance systems, completely bypassing local ordinances which forbid dragnet surveillance or offering information to agencies such as ICE without a warrant signed by a judge.

o You may remember the infamous NSA presentation which laughed at Americans for being so stupid as to become addicted to devices (smart phones) which NSA had happily dual-purposed for incorporation into their dragnet surveillance systems, but do you see the difference from the smart grid? USG won't have to worry about "pushback" from telcos if they replace the private systems which they have already dual purposed (in secret until the Snowden leaks) as dragnet surveillance systems, because US cities have been constructing "city owned" [sic] systems which are actually operated remotely from out-of-state command centers subject to USG warrantless dragnet subpoenas--- that's why the spooks love the smart grid.

o West coast citizens of sanctuary cities in particular should note that FL and KS are not exactly known in the US as centers of progressive politics.

My point in brief: things you assume are not dangerous or relevant to civil liberties concerns or to your children's future well being might actually be very dangerous and very relevant.

I felt obligated to thank you for this post due to the mere size of it... Super informative :))))))

love, Nan