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posted by martyb on Monday October 17 2016, @07:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the where's-the-nearest-Starbucks? dept.

Multiple sources reporting:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37680411
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/10/17/wikileaks-says-assanges-internet-link-was-severed-by-state-party.html
http://time.com/4532984/wikileaks-julian-assange-theories/

Wikileaks has announced that Julian Assange's internet access had been intentionally severed by a state actor. I would assume this means they disrupted a VPN connection he had rather than just cutting all internet access to the Ecuadorian Embassy, but again details are limited.

The announcement of disruption was also preceded by multiple strange tweets of random numbers (likely crypto keys) that appear to be part of a dead man system activated by the disruption.

takyon: The full tweet states "Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party. We have activated the appropriate contingency plans." Wikileaks recently released Part 9 of the Podesta Emails. Also at CNET and Ars Technica.

Update: Wikileaks says: "We can confirm Ecuador cut off Assange's internet access Saturday, 5pm GMT, shortly after publication of Clinton's Goldman Sachs speechs."

Perhaps the embassy's perennial guest has finally overstayed his welcome?


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  • (Score: 2) by Username on Monday October 17 2016, @08:13PM

    by Username (4557) on Monday October 17 2016, @08:13PM (#415364)

    Not sure if burner phones have data now, but dialup over voice circuits is the hardest form to block, or capture. Might run out of minutes trying to RX/TX files in the gigabit range over dialup though.

    PS: whoever’s the dick that keeps moding posts they disagree with as troll, knock it off. Pretty sure OP honestly believes what he said and isn’t trying to troll. Assange should have multiple means to continue to do his work. Even if it is carrier pigeons with sd cards.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @08:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 17 2016, @08:21PM (#415371)
  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday October 17 2016, @11:58PM

    by edIII (791) on Monday October 17 2016, @11:58PM (#415465)

    Not sure if burner phones have data now, but dialup over voice circuits is the hardest form to block, or capture. Might run out of minutes trying to RX/TX files in the gigabit range over dialup though.

    That doesn't seem correct at all :)

    A 56Kb modem can only do ~200MB per day in data transfer at full rate the entire time. You would need to bond many together to have a reasonable amount of bandwidth to work with. Upstream is still hampered around 33.6Kb, even with v90.

    Blocking it is hilariously simple. Just pick up the line and ask Assange, "Are you on the Internet!? I told you to take out the trash first!". The embassy could introduce some static noise and fuck it all up, but then again, is it VoIP? There is a reason why t38 fax support sucks ass, and that we've pretty much given up on sending faxes over the Internet (FoIP). I've never seen it work properly and reliably either.

    VoIP uses special codecs and it is simply not an analog circuit. It can be so problematic that hold music is affected, as g729 is a speech conjugate algorithm that works better with speech than it does rhythm and beats.

    It's just plain difficult to establish an analog connection over VoIP equipment. Any point along the way that doesn't perfectly recreate the analog signal will fuck it up, and that can be done with a single transcoding event.

    Capturing them? Easy. Trivial. Millions per day.

    It's an analog voice circuit. Here in the U.S, Verisign makes billions operating what they call "Mediation switches" which do exactly that; Capture analog voice traffic in bulk for later surveillance.

    That traffic is really just a different Layer 1 than is typically used, but its Layer 2 looks awfully darn familiar, and the Layer 3 is still the same TCP stack that most of us use. Faxes have long been traditionally considered secure in corporations, but that is so laughably stupid that only c-suites keep repeating it. The IT departments just roll their eyes when they hear a fax is required for "security".

    A fax is practically no different than a modem transmitting data packets between another modem, and they can be captured and replayed in real time. I've never even heard of an endpoint-to-endpoint encrypted fax setup, but I've heard plenty of times how a corporate fax line was penetrated and that thousands of confidential documents were intercepted.

    To give you an idea of just how stupid fax security was, I could've penetrated a Forbes 400 company from their telephone CO out on the street. There is a scene in the movie Sneakers where they're under the street intercepting the emergency circuits at a bank. Same thing. Almost every corporation was vulnerable at the dmarc, and 66-blocks were effective "keys to the kingdom" if there ever were any.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
    • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:03AM

      by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:03AM (#415476) Journal

      Am I missing something? 60 seconds/minute *60 minutes/hour *24 hours/day *56000 bits/second /8 bits/byte /1024 bytes/kB /1024 kB/MB = 576.8 MB/day

      200 MB/day works out to 19418 bits/second.

      Even 200 MB/day of uncompressed plain text is far more than anyone can read or write. With a mastery of meditation--or under sufficient sedation--one might have the patience to even view a few Web pages.

      • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:29AM

        by edIII (791) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:29AM (#415484)

        No, I missed the difference between bits and bytes. That 200MB mark is what I was effectively pushing through a 56K modem on a moderately crappy connection 17k ft from the CO. It may have been suboptimal speeds :) (although never underestimate the speed of 4GB hard drives doing 60mph between a data center and a house)

        Even still, 576.8 MB is not the much. While it still may be more than what can be read or written by a person, that doesn't mean it's suitable for data transfers, or that it can suffer the overhead of encryption and document formatting. Not with recent data, that tends to be pretty bloated.

        With a mastery of meditation--or under sufficient sedation--one might have the patience to even view a few Web pages.

        Some of us older guys are laughing quite a bit right now. The "Internet" used to be pretty slow, and protocols that could let you view the data while you downloaded it were cutting edge and pretty cool.

        Download speeds used to be slow enough that you needed to pace yourself viewing porn. So you could last till the bottom of the image, or perhaps even go through a couple of them in "real time". The funniest pranks I've ever heard of was replacing a girls pussy with a big ol' dick or Bozo the Clown, as the dude was wanking furiously for a few minutes till the "big reveal". Older BBS's had a sense of humour.

        Porn in ye olden times was an adventure where you earned the reward. Dudes these days with the Internet and 40 thumbnails loading in less than a second are so spoiled :)

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:18PM

          by Bot (3902) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @04:18PM (#416197) Journal

          > although never underestimate the speed of 4GB hard drives doing 60mph

          The speed is therefore 60mph. :)

          --
          Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:38AM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:38AM (#415486) Journal

        The math doesn't tell the whole story. Years ago, when all I had was dialup in Outback Nowhere, downloading an ISO of a few hundred megabytes might take all week. We didn't have bittorrent, there were just FTP and browser downloaders, and a couple download managers. You got about half the ISO, and got a message that the file was corrupt, do you want to start over. FTP was far more reliable than any other choice of downloaders, but not all sites supported FTP.

        Long story short, dial up sucked the llama's ass.

        • (Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:32AM

          by butthurt (6141) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:32AM (#415503) Journal

          Rsync was released in 1996; for those who had a shell account it could make such things relatively painless.

          https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=msg/comp.os.linux.announce/tZE1qtTcQaU/IF8GhGQ_uTsJ [google.com]

          Aside from that, there were (are) ways of resuming an interrupted download, or failing that, breaking a file into smaller files, to be combined after they all arrived.

          zipsplit - split a zipfile into smaller zipfiles
          [...]
          -n size
                  Make zip files no larger than "size" (default = 36000).

          --
          http://www.info-zip.org/mans/zipsplit.html [info-zip.org]

          split — split a file into pieces
          [...]
          -b, --bytes=SIZE
                  put SIZE bytes per output file

          -- https://www.mankier.com/1/split [mankier.com]

          ZMODEM supports enormous block sizes and, following a communication failure, allows transfers to resume from where they stopped.

          -- https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1805/zmodem [techopedia.com]

          The NcFTP client can reget files which have only partially downloaded.

          -- http://www.linuxmisc.com/3-solaris/8399fba0726d9e39.htm [linuxmisc.com]

          One fellow, however, had difficulty downloading such an FTP client:

          Please, tell me where I may get an FTP client for
          Windows 3.11, which has "restart" or "reget" option. I was
          given a PPP connection (for free) from George Soros'
          International Scientific Foundation (ISF, Kiev Branch). But
          their name server is overrun by users' calls during most of
          the day and I can access it only from 01.00 to 07.00.
          Generally, there is only 300-800 bps speed of transfer,
          which makes files larger then 500k almost unaccessible for
          me. Last night I tried to pull out a 1.8M file from the USA.
          That was very stupid. I went around my PC all night long
          like a hungry jakal around a dying elephant but, alas. The
          transfer was aborted at around 08.00 after I got a 0.7M
          portion. Well, someone's surfing -- someone's "snailing".

          :-(

                    I found a utility from ftp.download.com, which can
          retrieve files in several sessions ("GetRight" shareware)
          but again, it is too large for me (1.140M zip) and it
          requires Windows95. I also tried to download an evaluation
          copy of WS_FTP from Ipswitch.com (both "Profesional" and
          "Limited Edition") but all transfers (6 attempts) were
          aborted after approx. 100K had been done.

          I shall appreciate it highly if somebody tell me where I can
          get a "reget" (not very large and for Windows3.11).

          -- https://lists.purdue.edu/pipermail/cytometry/1997-March/006699.html [purdue.edu]

          • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:44AM

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:44AM (#415509) Journal

            Informative, but I needed you to tell me this over 20 years ago. ;^)

            Back then, FTP was a "new" technology to me. Not to the computing world, but to me. I certainly can't tell you which client I was using then, but it could and would fail to resume. The resume feature was there, it simply failed as often as not. And, at that time, I had no idea what rsync was. My "support" consisted of people who had relative "broadband", trying to help some country hick out. They didn't seem to understand my problems, and I certainly didn't understand how they managed to download the entire internet on a daily basis.

    • (Score: 2) by Username on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:26AM

      by Username (4557) on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:26AM (#415501)

      I was thinking more about the inception level of encapsulation going on. Even if it’s recorded they still need to convert the analog signal to digital through some kinda virtual modem or something. Probably doable, yeah, but far harder and tedious than sending an already digital capture to a server farm to crack. Then finding it through all the other voice data, and figuring out it’s not just a fax of some guys asscheeks but assange’s secret 56k line. They would most likely be looking for already digital data.