The tone which comes across in the video (linked from the other post I linked to in this post’s description) is unfortunately much less amicable than this article conveys.

the guy speaking off camera in the linked 3min 30s of the video is Ted Ts’o, according to this report about the session.

it’s been nearly four years since he stopped being involved with it, fyi.

https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-it-was-a-us-led-coup-all-along/

https://orinocotribune.com/venezuela-it-was-a-us-led-coup-all-along/

Really?! I have never seen a paywall there, and I usually access it using tor browser (so, coming from a variety of countries).

lol, i just accepted the title tag from the page which the create post form auto-filled 🤡

E: old thinkpad gang input: take the time to reapply thermal grease to the cpu at some point. It makes a huge difference.

What’s a “gang input”?

😂 it’s an input to this discussion from a member of the group of people (“gang”) who have experience with old thinkpads. and yes, if your old thinkpad (or other laptop) is overheating and crashing, reapplying the thermal paste is a good next step after cleaning the fans.

xzbot from Anthony Weems enables to patch the corrupted liblzma to change the private key used to compare it to the signed ssh certificate, so adding this to your instructions might enable me to demonstrate sshing into the VM :)

Fun :)

Btw, instead of installing individual vulnerable debs as those kali instructions I linked to earlier suggest, you could also point debootstrap at the snapshot service so that you get a complete system with everything as it would’ve been in late March and then run that in a VM… or in a container. You can find various instructions for creating containers and VMs using debootstrap (eg, this one which tells you how to run a container with systemd-nspawn; but you could also do it with podman or docker or lxc). When the instructions tell you to run debootstrap, you just want to specify a snapshot URL like https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20240325T212344Z/ in place of the usual Debian repository url (typically https://deb.debian.org/debian/).

A daily ISO of Debian testing or Ubuntu 24.04 (noble) beta from prior to the first week of April would be easiest, but those aren’t archived anywhere that I know of. It didn’t make it in to any stable releases of any Debian-based distros.

But even when you have a vulnerable system running sshd in a vulnerable configuration, you can’t fully demo the backdoor because it requires the attacker to authenticate with their private key (which has not been revealed).

But, if you just want to run it and observe the sshd slowness that caused the backdoor to be discovered, here are instructions for installing the vulnerable liblzma deb from snapshot.debian.org.

Mattermost isn’t e2ee, but if the server is run by someone competent and they’re allowed to see everything anyway (eg it’s all group chat, and they’re in all the groups) then e2ee isn’t as important as it would be otherwise as it is only protecting against the server being compromised (a scenario which, if you’re using web-based solutions which do have e2ee, also leads to circumvention of it).

If you’re OK with not having e2ee, I would recommend Zulip over Mattermost. Mattermost is nice too though.

edit: oops, i see you also want DMs… Mattermost and Zulip both have them, but without e2ee. 😢

I could write a book about problems with Matrix, but if you want something relatively easy and full featured with (optional, and non-forward-secret) e2ee then it is probably your best bet today.

you don’t see any downside to nuclear escalation?

Yes he could be extradited and found not guilty No member of the press deserves to go to jail For doing that’s job

So, I guess you’re either being disingenuous or you haven’t followed the case much. If it’s the latter, I highly encourage you to read the two links in my earlier comment, and/or any of these: 1, 2, 3

Are you aware of anyone besides yourself seriously arguing that he has any chance of being found not guilty in a US espionage trial, while also saying that he doesn’t deserve to go to jail?

As far as I’ve seen, any remotely informed commentator who argues that he could get a “fair trial” in the US is also arguing that it would be “fair” for him to be convicted and spend the rest of his life in prison.

getting a fair trial

🤨 did you read any of the links in my last comment?

(are you suggesting you think that he could actually be extradited and found not guilty, or are you saying you think he deserves to go to prison and that is what you mean by saying he would be “better off” not fighting extradition?)

First amendment is given to us by our creators it says so in the us constution everyone gets it period

Neither the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or any of its other amendments use the word “creator”. You’re probably thinking of the Declaration of Independence (the famous second sentence of which is “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”). The DoI predates the Constitution and its amendments by over a decade and has no force of law.

There is a strong legal argument to be made, including some historical court rulings, that at least some of the rights in the Bill of Rights do apply to non-citizens - although some of those arguments are limited to when non-citizens are on US soil (which Assange was not when he engaged in the acts of journalism which he is being prosecuted for).

However, one of the US prosecutors (Gordon Kromberg) specifically told the court in his declaration in support of the Assange extradition:

Concerning any First Amendment challenge, the United States could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment […]

Former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo also wrote in his memoir Never Give An Inch:

Julian Assange has no First Amendment privileges. He is not a U.S. citizen.

Other US officials have made similar statements.

You can read more here:

• https://thedissenter.org/countdown-to-day-x-us-assange-no-first-amendment-rights/
• https://www.jurist.org/features/2023/08/21/law-professor-marjorie-cohn-extradition-of-julian-assange-threatens-first-amendment-and-freedom-of-press/

Last month, the British High Court gave the US prosecutors until April 16 to submit a declaration including assurances that “the applicant is permitted to rely on the first amendment” and that he “is afforded the same first amendment protections as a United States citizen” (those are the British court’s words).

The assurance the US has now submitted did not actually repudiate the prosecutors earlier explicit statement that the “the United States could argue that foreign nationals are not entitled to protections under the First Amendment” but instead said merely that he can “seek to raise” the first amendment in his defense. But, he has already been seeking to raise the first amendment to stop his extradition, and these “assurances” that he can seek to raise it again in the US come from the same prosecutors who explicitly argued (and again, have not repudiated their argument) to the British court that he is not entitled to first amendment protection because he is a foreign national.

You didn’t answer my question: Better off than what?

He is better off in the USA he can clam first amendment rights freedom of the press

The US position is that the first amendment doesn’t apply to non-citizens, and also that it isn’t possible to make a public interest defense to espionage charges.

also he won’t get death the worst is 20 to life

The current set of charges carry up to 175 years and the US has thus far refused to guarantee to the British court that they won’t add more charges after they extradite him.

And even if he was “only” facing 20 to life, what would that be better than? He isn’t charged with anything anywhere else.

Update:

https://twitter.com/Stella_Assange/status/1780258878237667377

the US didn’t have to coerce them to kick him out.

You think the $4.2B IMF loan package they got 30 days before his expulsion wasn’t contingent on revoking his asylum? Here is evidence that it was, two months before it happened.

He essentially got kicked out for installing spyware and listening devices into the embassy’s private network.

What? The listening devices and hidden cameras were in fact installed by the Spanish private security company who was ostensibly working for the embassy but who it turned out was also working for the CIA, for the purpose of spying on Assange (including in the bathroom, where he would go to meet with his lawyers due to his suspicion that the other rooms had been bugged), as has been well documented in both US and Spanish courts:

• https://elpais.com/elpais/2019/10/23/inenglish/1571817241_796975.html

• https://english.elpais.com/spain/2023-03-29/spanish-company-provided-cia-with-information-leading-to-julian-assanges-arrest.html

• https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-12-22/a-spanish-company-and-the-cia-found-guilty-of-violating-rights-of-julian-assanges-visitors.html#

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_of_Julian_Assange

What is it that people in the UK don’t understand about ‘indeterminate detention without charge’?

He was detained without charge for many years, but there are charges now: the US unsealed their 2018 indictment against him immediately after they coerced Ecuador into revoking his asylum in April 2019, and they added more charges a month later.

As the linked article explains, he is currently charged with 17 counts of espionage and 1 count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. He remains in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh while fighting the US’s extradition request.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julian_Assange