Mike Portnoy joins Roie, Dan, and Vic on this special episode of Wheel of Prog to help rank the albums of Opeth. How would you rank these? Let us know in the comments.

Watch the previous Wheel of Prog episodes on Neal Morse & Mike Portnoy, Rush, Dream Theater, and Porcupine Tree. The Wheel of Prog episodes are on YouTube only.

cross-posted from: https://monero.town/post/554820

The two discuss the prominent blockchain privacy paper co-authored by Vitalik Buterin, the future of blockchain privacy vs surveillance coins. Alan explains why there’s a need to stop putting the state on a pedestal in the privacy debate in order to defend privacy in the future, the reason the US government doesn’t care as much about money laundering as long as it happens in US banks.

http://KEXP.ORG presents Mdou Moctar performing "Tarhatazed" live in the KEXP studio. Recorded May 25, 2018.

Host: DJ Rhythma Audio Engineer: Kevin Suggs Cameras: Alaia D'Alessandro, Scott Holpainen & Justin Wilmore Editor: Justin Wilmore

http://kexp.org

DEF CON Infosec super-band the Cult of the Dead Cow has released Veilid (pronounced vay-lid), an open source project applications can use to connect up clients and transfer information in a peer-to-peer decentralized manner.

The idea being here that apps – mobile, desktop, web, and headless – can find and talk to each other across the internet privately and securely without having to go through centralized and often corporate-owned systems. Veilid provides code for app developers to drop into their software so that their clients can join and communicate in a peer-to-peer community.

In a DEF CON presentation today, Katelyn "medus4" Bowden and Christien "DilDog" Rioux ran through the technical details of the project, which has apparently taken three years to develop.

The system, written primarily in Rust with some Dart and Python, takes aspects of the Tor anonymizing service and the peer-to-peer InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). If an app on one device connects to an app on another via Veilid, it shouldn't be possible for either client to know the other's IP address or location from that connectivity, which is good for privacy, for instance. The app makers can't get that info, either.

Veilid's design is documented here, and its source code is here, available under the Mozilla Public License Version 2.0.

"IPFS was not designed with privacy in mind," Rioux told the DEF CON crowd. "Tor was, but it wasn't built with performance in mind. And when the NSA runs 100 [Tor] exit nodes, it can fail."

Unlike Tor, Veilid doesn't run exit nodes. Each node in the Veilid network is equal, and if the NSA wanted to snoop on Veilid users like it does on Tor users, the Feds would have to monitor the entire network, which hopefully won't be feasible, even for the No Such Agency. Rioux described it as "like Tor and IPFS had sex and produced this thing."

"The possibilities here are endless," added Bowden. "All apps are equal, we're only as strong as the weakest node and every node is equal. We hope everyone will build on it."

Veilid

Big launch ... medus4, left, and DilDog at DEF CON

Each copy of an app using the core Veilid library acts as a network node, it can communicate with other nodes, and uses a 256-bit public key as an ID number. There are no special nodes, and there's no single point of failure. The project supports Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and web apps.

Veilid can talk over UDP and TCP, and connections are authenticated, timestamped, strongly end-to-end encrypted, and digitally signed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and impersonation. The cryptography involved has been dubbed VLD0, and uses established algorithms since the project didn't want to risk introducing weaknesses from "rolling its own," Rioux said.

This means XChaCha20-Poly1305 for encryption, Elliptic curve25519 for public-private-key authentication and signing, x25519 for DH key exchange, BLAKE3 for cryptographic hashing, and Argon2 for password hash generation. These could be switched out for stronger mechanisms if necessary in future.

Files written to local storage by Veilid are fully encrypted, and encrypted table store APIs are available for developers. Keys for encrypting device data can be password protected.

"The system means there's no IP address, no tracking, no data collection, and no tracking – that's the biggest way that people are monetizing your internet use," Bowden said.

"Billionaires are trying to monetize those connections, and a lot of people are falling for that. We have to make sure this is available," Bowden continued. The hope is that applications will include Veilid and use it to communicate, so that users can benefit from the network without knowing all the above technical stuff: it should just work for them.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the system, the team built a Veilid-based secure instant-messaging app along the lines of Signal called VeilidChat, using the Flutter framework. Many more apps are needed.

If it takes off in a big way, Veilid could put a big hole in the surveillance capitalism economy. It's been tried before with mixed or poor results, though the Cult has a reputation for getting stuff done right.

Veilid Source

The first matter to address is the question "What is Veilid?" The highest-level description is that Veilid is a peer-to-peer network for easily sharing various kinds of data.

Veilid is designed with a social dimension in mind, so that each user can have their personal content stored on the network, but also can share that content with other people of their choosing, or with the entire world if they want.

The primary purpose of the Veilid network is to provide the infrastructure for a specific kind of shared data: social media in various forms. That includes light-weight content such as Twitter's tweets or Mastodon's toots, medium-weight content like images and songs, and heavy-weight content like videos. Meta-content such as personal feeds, replies, private messages, and so forth are also intended to run atop Veilid.

L0pht Heavy Industries testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Live feed from CSPAN, May 19, 1998. Starring Brian Oblivion, Kingpin (Joe Grand), Tan, Space Rogue, Weld Pond, Mudge, and Stefan von Neumann.

This is the infamous testimony where Mudge stated we could take down the Internet in 30 minutes. Although that's all the media took from it, much more was discussed. See for yourself.

This comment hit the nail on the head. I feel like I played right into his hands. But what is a person to do?

remember the real reason he bought Twitter was to influence the 2024 election and stop any kind of leftist organizing on the site

May this community be inspired by Aaron's spirit.

Here's his manifesto:

Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal — there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

Aaron Swartz

July 2008, Eremo, Italy