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Ask a Hacker

AIDS concert reaches two
billion audience

New album from Dead Prez

Broken Word

Sustainable energy solutions
come to Asheville

Living with the consequences
of US policy

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Ask a Hacker

By Atom Smasher

(AGR)-- Julius Caesar had a problem. He needed to communicate with his troops, but if his enemies got a hold of his plans, it would have been disastrous for him. What he did was substitute every letter “a” in his message with “d,” every “b” would be substituted with “e,” etc. If his enemy intercepted his messages, they would not be able to read it. The solution might seem obvious today, but back then this stuff was high-tech. His generals in the field knew the “key” to decipher these messages, by shifting each letter 3 places.

Fast forward a few thousand years, and that type of cipher can be cracked by an average 10-year-old. Today, we need to do better.

“There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files,” says Bruce Schneier of Applied Cryptography.

As we can see, encryption technology that used to stand up against major governments can now fall to your kid sister. Our problem today isn’t different from Caesar’s problem (how to send secure communications using insecure channels), but our solution has to be better. Imagine that I have a magic paper shredder. Like any paper shredder, I can shred my note and make it very difficult (and time consuming) for anyone to read it. But this paper shredder is magic, and after I send you all of the pieces of that shredded message, you can just whisper your secret password and all of those shredded pieces turn themselves back into the original note. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is just like that magic shredder; it can provide the security that we need to keep our secret communications secret. So, how good is “pretty good?” If properly used and implemented, a message encrypted with PGP should be safe from big brother for about 30 years:

That’s if they want to spend 30 years trying to read it. If that’s not secure enough, you can use larger keys (think of shredding the paper into smaller pieces), and the earth will likely crash into the sun before big brother reads the message. By that time, the message will probably not be important to anyone. Of course, the person that the message is sent to can always read it within a few seconds.

Now, there’s the possibility that some government agency can crack the messages faster than that, but if they can they haven’t told me about it. Cracking an encrypted message should be “expensive,” in terms of time and other resources. If someone wants to reassemble the pieces of paper that my magic shredder spits out, they’ll have to figure out how the pieces fit together: The smaller the pieces, the more resources (and time) they have to commit to the problem.

It’s generally believed within the cryptographic community that if big brother wants to read a single message, he probably can (although there’s no consensus of how long that would take), but if he wants to read all of the encrypted messages, he simply can’t. This is very different from regular email, where messages can be scanned, copied, analyzed, sorted and searched for subversive key words as fast as the messages are sent. For this reason, it’s a matter of solidarity that activists use PGP not only when we need it, but also when we don’t. If someone wants to read your encrypted email, it greatly frustrates their efforts if they spend 30 years cracking a message, and then find out that they’ve uncovered a note about what bands are playing tonight, instead of a message about who is organizing a direct action.

PGP also solves problems of key distribution and authentication, but we’ll talk more about that some other time.

How much does PGP cost? There are (at least) two free versions, one (MIT-PGP) from MIT; the other (GnuPG) from the Free Software Foundation. For links and more resources, see my web site, below.

If you have any questions you’d like to ask, you’ll find my contact information at http://atom.smasher.org/ or you can send questions to editors@agrnews.org My PGP fingerprint is:

3EBE 2810 30AE 601D 54B2 4A90 9C28 0BBF 3D7D 41E3

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By Fred Bridgeland and James Burleigh

Nov. 30— The world’s biggest internet charity event got under way in Cape Town last night with musicians including Peter Gabriel and Annie Lennox backing the anti-AIDS campaign sponsored by Nelson Mandela.

The 46664 concert, named after Mandela’s prison number on Robben Island, which is within sight of Cape Town’s Green Point Stadium, was streamed live on the internet, with service providers hosting the netcast free in Britain and 14 other countries. It was also shown on BBCi, MTV online and RealNetworks, with the organizers aiming to reach 2 billion people; 40,000 watched it live.

“I’ve just come from an orphanage where I held a beautiful little girl called Emma in my arms and she’s going to die [from AIDS] because it’s too late to administer the drugs that could have prolonged her life.”

The first act was Beyoncé, who sang her hit single “Crazy in Love.” She was followed by Bob Geldof, who organized the Live Aid concerts for Ethiopia in 1985, who said: “AIDS has ceased to be something to be ashamed of ­ it’s just another medical condition, but if the condition is medical the solution is political.”

Since leaving office, Mandela has thrown himself into the campaign against AIDS, admitting that he did not do enough to tackle the problem when he was president. Some 5.3 million South Africans are HIV-positive, more than in any other country, but the government has only just agreed to release funds for antiretroviral drugs, mainly due to the opposition of Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, who long disputed the connection between HIV and AIDS.

The 46664 concert will raise funds through donations as well as downloadable versions of last night’s songs, many of which had been written for the occasion. People in 17 countries could call a premium-rate line to hear a celebrity message and unreleased songs. Callers were logged as having given their support to a petition calling on governments to declare a global AIDS emergency, and a portion of the cost of the phone call went to the 46664 campaign and the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

Mandela revisited Robben Island on Friday and said it would take greater unity and effort to conquer the disease than it took to tear down apartheid.

“I’m speechless,” said Annie Lennox, who wore a T-shirt reading “17 million AIDS dead.” “I saw a vision of hell where Mandela and his fellow inmates were kept. To sacrifice his life and still come out to fight AIDS, it’s incredible.”

The concert was screened globally by MTV on World AIDS Day, Dec. 1.

Source: Independent (UK)

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New Album from Dead Prez

By Kent

(AGR)-- At the beginning and end we are reminded that this is only a mix tape, and that a new official album — Revolutionary But Gangsta — is still on the way. Instead of being that official DP album, we get the Mix Tape Volume Two by the RBG family. Sticman and M1 are strangely absent from at least half the songs. Instead, DP uses their stardom to bring attention to a new group of emcees and producers who, until now, have never had any major releases, with the exception of Onyx.

Mix Tape Volume Two follows last year’s release of the first mix tape, a rough, poorly produced masterpiece. It was musically accessible to a broader hip hop audience, ganking familiar beats from the more mainstream and using loud AK-47 rounds to fade from track to track. They seemed to laugh in the face of all the Nelly’s and 50 Cent corporate whores with their catchy rhymes and revolutionary flows. Sadly this isn’t continued on the Vol. 2, nor does it even seem like the same group that brought us the hot jams of Lets Get Free.

Sadly, the tracks on the mix tape are musically weak, with a few exceptions like “Fuck The Law” and “Window To My Soul.” With the emergence of the RBG family on this mix tape, one emcee in particular, the recently incarcerated Askari X featured in “Scared to Die” comes out strong. While Onyx references the anarchist cookbook in “Last Days Reloaded”, they fail to really say anything relevant with the exception of a few buzzwords here and there, barely allowing Dead Prez to squeeze in a few lines of revolutionary wisdom.

This album doesn’t fail to tokenize females either: in the intro, a woman is heard only in the kitchen cooking, and the further objectification of women in “Coming Of Age” can be heard only minutes later. But at the same time it is condemned, most of the album is expressed in a past-tense reminiscent of the old school days. It is with this that it becomes blurry and confusing as to what Dead Prez’s present ideologies are. A sexist tone is taken but never entirely grabs a hold, and many of the songs seem all too often to be in the glitzy mainstream state of mind that has dominated hip-hop today. It should also be pointed out that this album lacks women emcees and producers.

Many recent reviews have recognized that there is a bit of a prejudice against white people in some of the lyrics. This is justifiable to me seeing as how, as Dead Prez puts it, the “Chemical warfare (drugs) in the black neighborhoods” and the “land grabbing (gentrification)” which takes place are both examples of systematic disempowerment by the ruling white class.

I don’t necessarily believe that Sticman, M1, or the RBG family really give a fuck about how I feel about their music or lyrics. What middle class white folk should understand is that this isn’t about appealing to us for once. The truth is this album is for and by oppressed Africans who are in a constant struggle to survive. This is a “community revolution in progress” says M1 in the “hood news.” Above all, this is an outreach to all those being crushed trying to stay afloat in this racist capitalist system.

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