All your keys are belong to us

September 6th, 2013

The official truth, which for once seems believable, is:

because strong encryption can be so effective, classified N.S.A. documents make clear, the agency’s success depends on working with Internet companies — by getting their voluntary collaboration, forcing their cooperation with court orders or surreptitiously stealing their encryption keys or altering their software or hardware.

So, the NSA has the private key that is used by your https server. The question then is, how?

If you leave the front door wide open, and you find your house has been burgled, it is possible that the burglars have a super secret underground tunnel that comes up into a well hidden trapdoor in your basement.

But chances are that they waltzed in through the wide open front door.

And by “wide open front door” I mean the common practice of the certificate authority making up your secret key for you and sending it to you.

Snowden, who knows what the NSA is up to, tells us:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.

Trouble is, seldom properly implemented.

Strong, non human memorable, secret keys should be created in place on the device that their corresponding public key identifies, and never leave that device. There should be no user interface and no best practice procedures for managing such secret keys, only for managing the corresponding public keys, which should be presented to the user as guids or something like a guid, as something like a vin number. The way a sysem administrator should perceive setting up an https server is that the server makes up a guid, and he then gets a certificate from the certificate authority saying that the guid is good for his organization and/or domain name, and installs the certificate for the guid on the server. He should not need to know or think about private keys.

Posted in crypto | 20 Comments »

Cladistic analysis of neoreaction

September 5th, 2013

As humans are bony fishes, and the Cathedral the heretical spawn of Cromwell’s puritans, the neoreaction is the heretical spawn of Libertarianism and anarcho capitalism.  Consider for example the blog title Anarcho Papist.

The Dark Enlightenment is libertarians mugged by reality, a libertarian who realizes that the eighteenth century was right about women, and Bull Conner right about blacks..

An anarcho capitalist favors a free market in law and defense agencies, defense agencies that are in many cases the private property of individuals and small groups.  A neoreactionary is an anarcho capitalist who thinks that a monopoly defense agency that is the private property of one man (monarchy) or a cartel of defense agencies that are the private property of a few men (feudalism) is not so bad after all.  Hence, throne conservatism.

He concludes that, progressivism being an official religion, therefore an official religion is unavoidable.  He suspects that most people need religion to persuade them to act sensibly, hence, whether Atheist or Christian, he endorses altar conservatism. (Or in the case of Israel, Temple Judaism.)

Thus libertarianism mutates into throne and altar conservatism, as puritanism mutated into militant atheism. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in economics, politics | 45 Comments »

The Dark Enlightenment critique of Libertarianism

September 5th, 2013

The problem with libertarianism is that it really only works if libertarian rules are generally enforced, accepted, and felt to be right, only works if other people practice libertarianism. What, then, do you do with the large majority of mankind that are disinclined to live by these rules, or incapable of living by these rules? Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in politics | 11 Comments »

Radish nails libertarianism’s race problem

September 2nd, 2013

Libertarianism had its one brief shining day in power in alliance with the anti racist, anti slavery brigade, was swiftly kicked out of that alliance, and has been beaten over the head with race stick ever since, despite endlessly begging to be allowed to renew the alliance.

Since then, the only times it has ever gotten anywhere is in alliance with the “racist”, aka white, faction.

Posted in economics, party politics, politics | 20 Comments »

War with Syria

September 1st, 2013

If crimes committed far away by bad people against other far away bad people are important enough for Americans to go to war over, they are important enough to call Congress back to work early from summer vacation to vote for war or peace.

If they are not important enough to interrupt congresscritters summer vacation, they are not important enough to go to war over.

Posted in war | 11 Comments »

Dysgenics and mutational load

August 31st, 2013

It seems probable that most variation in health, beauty, and IQ is due to genetic load, large numbers of rare genetic variants. About fifteen percent of the human genome is under negative selection, meaning that in about fifteen percent of the human genome, any random change is likely to be harmful, most variants get eliminated by natural selection in a reasonable time.

The mutation rate in humans is one or two mutations per hundred million bases per generation, probably around one mutation per hundred million bases, for a total of around thirty to sixty mutations per generation, implying around five to nine harmful mutations per generation.

Since we must have been near equilibrium in the ancestral environment, this implies five to nine harmful mutations were eliminated every generation.

This amounts to natural selection working fiercely – that just to stay in the same place we were running mighty fast, that survival of the fittest was pretty harsh.  Since we have not been experiencing severe natural selection since the Industrial Revolution, the number of harmful mutations in the typical individual must have increased by about forty or so.  We must have devolved quite significantly. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in science | 13 Comments »

On Judaism

August 28th, 2013

I have been arguing in the comments with B about Judaism, and in the course of this argument, my position shifted considerably.

Judaism was a theocratic national religion, state religion, and ethnic religion, a nation state religion. Just what the doctor ordered, just the kind of thing reactionaries like, just the kind of thing that makes a people strong.

Upon the Jews being exiled, the Sadducees lost their power base and Rabbis remade Judaism to be an exile ethnic religion, inherently hostile to, and subversive of, the host nation and host society.

This has become a paradoxical and psychologically unhealthy religion, since the Jews are no longer in exile, but Judaism is still in exile, still subversive of the host nation even when the host nation is Israel, and still subversive of the host society even when the host society is Jewish.  Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in culture, war | 20 Comments »

Christians did not build the Cathedral – but Churches did.

August 25th, 2013

The Orthosphere is always apologizing for Christianity, supporting it, and defending it, while I treat as merely markedly less harmful than the belief systems that people are likely to believe when they stop believing in Christianity. And today the Orthosphere publishes a guest post that asserts Christians Did Not Build “The Cathedral”

Which tells us:

you should begin to doubt the internet authors who tell you that the leftist programs of what they like to call “the Cathedral” originated in the Christianity of the churches of New England.

Indeed, it originated not in the Christianity of the churches of New England, but in the heresy of the Churches of New England. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in politics | 107 Comments »

Words and meanings

August 25th, 2013

When the ostensive meaning, the nominal meaning, and the nominal ostensive meaning of a word differ, the word is itself a lie, a lie contained in a single word that makes any sentence containing it a lie.

A word primarily means what it is used to refer to, its ostensive meaning. During childhood language acquisition, it means what mothers refer to when speaking to their children. The mother says “look, a dog”, and the child then knows what a dog is.

Then there is the nominal meaning, what dictionaries say the word means in terms of other words, what high status people say they mean, which is not necessarily what they do mean.

And then there is the nominal ostensive meaning – what people say they are pointing at, even though in fact they may be pointing at something completely different.

The difference between the ostensive meaning, what they point at, and the nominal ostensive meaning or the dictionary meaning, what they say they point at, is the lie. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in culture | 12 Comments »

Do not believe anything in the New York Times

August 22nd, 2013

The New York Times has gotten hold of a secret Chinese Communist Party memo, which lists seven subversive currents in Chinese society, which could lead to the overthrow of the party after the fashion of the French Revolution. The New York Times, however fails to list all seven subversive currents, merely giving us their interpretation of selected parts of the document.

Therefore, spin, therefore a lie. If they did not intend to mislead you, would give you the full seven.

Posted in politics | 9 Comments »

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